YMMV / Where the Crawdads Sing

• Award Snub: Taylor Swift's "Carolina" was expected to garner enough praise to receive a Song nomination, but despite the hype, it didn't make the cut.
• Critical Dissonance: The 2022 film has a 34% "Rotten" score (based on 190 reviews) on Rotten Tomatoes, but it has a whopping 96% among verified audiences (based on over 5,000 ratings) and a 7.1 on IMDB.
• Critic-Proof: The movie received largely negative reviews from critics, but that didn't stop it from grossing $140 million on a budget of just $24 million.
• Hype Backlash: The book became a much-hyped bestseller (including being selected for Reese Witherspoon's book club) and quickly received a film adaptation; it was praised for its strong protagonist, lavish prose and well-researched depictions of marsh life. However, round about when the film came out, more readers began stating they find the story overrated. While the prose is generally agreed to be good, many have criticized the pacing as tedious (more so in the courtroom sections), the central mystery as being overshadowed by the romance plot, geographical incongruities^note the book makes references to visits to Asheville like it's a quick trip, but it's actually on the other side of the state and at least a 6-hour drive, the main character as being unrealistic^note e.g. despite having abusive and/or neglectful parents, living by herself in a marsh since she was a kid and having no education or access to medical care, Kya is still healthy, conventionally attractive, and is literate to the point of publishing successful non-fiction books and poetry and the presence of stereotyping and cliches when it comes to other characters (some of which come off as laughable or downright offensive to some readers). Many critical readers have opined that the book isn't necessarily bad, there's just not much to it beyond light wish-fufillment. Not helping is that the book's success brought renewed attention to the author's connection to a real-life alleged murder, with many readers noting eerie similarities between the case and the book's plot.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The novel and its film adaptation are increasingly overshadowed by the controversy surrounding author Delia Owens; namely, that her ex-husband and former stepson are implicated in the televised 1995 killing of an alleged poacher in Zambia, where the Owenses were once involved in conservation work.^note it was never definitively proven if the man was a poacher or not, as he was never identified, with Mark and Christopher Owens being suspected of hiding the body While Delia Owens herself isn't believed to be directly involved in the alleged murder, she is considered a potential witness and several people have pointed out the eerieness of the novel's plot heavily featuring a murder and one that is ultimately portrayed as a righteous act the killer gets away with, when the author herself is linked to a potential unsolved homicide (along with other similarities). Some have speculated Owens may have used the incident as inspiration for the novel. Additionally, the Owenses had been accused of expressing racist views towards Africans, with some readers feeling this may be reflected in the portrayals of the black characters in the book. These controversies had been public knowledge for decades before Where the Crawdads Sing was written, but came to renewed attention in the early 2020s, after the novel became a bestseller and the film adaptation went into production.
• The Un-Twist: Kya is Chase's killer after all. During the trial it starts to look likely that Kya did kill Chase, until evidence comes up seemingly giving her a rock-solid alibi. She's ultimately acquitted and her lawyer chastizes the town for being so ready to believe she was guilty just because she doesn't fit in...then right at the end, after Kya has died, Tate finds evidence strongly suggesting her guilt.

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