Where the Crawdads Sing

I'm not sure what to make of this. I generally don't have a problem with broad tropes and cliches when a story has some fun with it, but there was very little levity in this book and it felt like it was trying to make profound statements that just came across as very dull.

Kya is a dirty swamp dweller who is actually alluringly beautiful. She's uneducated and illiterate, but actually a brilliant scientist and author. She even manages to find herself in essentially a classic racial prejudice story, but she doesn't even need a white saviour because she herself is white (what?).

The character Tate leaves part way through this book seemingly only to cause tension for the plot. The central murder is too unexplained by the last five minutes of the book for the reader to not expect something to happen, (and really only Kya or maybe Tate could have done it?) so it takes the punch out of something which maybe could have been a nice little reveal.

There's a serene quality to much of the writing that I enjoyed and a few plot and thematic sort of callbacks (though the effect was often lessened by an exact explanation as to its meaning the moment after). I thought the interweaving of the timelines mostly worked as well.