Ok my dudes.
I know that a lot of people loved this book. Enough to make it a number one best seller in the Failing New York Times, and a pick for Elle Woods’ book club. So far be it for me to shit in anyone else’s root beer float — but seriously … what in the North Cackalacka fuck did I just read?
I’ve been reading voraciously (on paper) of late, in a vain attempt to escape the “news” of plague and war that continues to stream from this glowing rectangle in a relentless surge of clickbait, and the feelings of despair and helplessness it engenders.
Being an unrepentant snob about literary fiction and all fiction … and also nonfiction … and ok fine every
word ever printed, I suppose I was predisposed to hate this book. But I thought I’d give it a shot. After all, I enjoy mass market candy as much as the next customer at Hudson News. Stephen King, for example, is a master of the craft. But this book was a hot mess, and believe me it takes one to know one.
They say life’s too short to finish books you hate. I say I can’t rip a book like this a new asshole until I get to the very last word. It’s just unfair. So I persevered in my hate-read, and I am officially renaming this book “Where the Sun Don’t Shine.” Because by the time I reached the last page, that’s exactly where I wanted to stick it. Again: if you read this book and liked it, I’m sorry. If you haven’t read it, don’t worry: I won’t include any spoilers in this “review.”
This book was basically a discordant mashup of Nicholas Sparks, James Patterson, the Secret Life of Bees, an Audubon Society quarterly edited by Jane Goodall, the Blue Lagoon, Mary Higgins Clark, and soft-core erotica for white wine moms.
You can almost see the 108-minute movie playing as you read it: picture a Prince of Tides/The Lake House remake starring Ryan Gosling, one of those Chrises, and maybe that creepy nanny from “Servant” on Apple+, all in a dumpster fire triumvirate of leaf-peeping, crying, and dry humping in a skiff tied up to a tree in the Outer Banks.
For all I know, it’s already in production.
The book is set in the 1960s, apparently to make full use of all historically available racist/sexist tropes and pidgeon English, with the dialogue written in cringey, contrived southern slang. Sentences like “well that thar fella’s so lowdown he’d hafta climb a ten-foot ladder to kiss a rattler’s ass!” Not that exact sentence, of course, but ones like it. Also a lot of courtroom cliches like “the State rests” and “I’ll allow it!” Which, as someone who’s spent the better part of two decades in and out of courtrooms, was extra cringe.
The main character, Kya Clark, lives alone in a marsh shack after her psycho abusive alcoholic dad drove the rest of her family away with a crow bar. She manages to outrun North Carolina children’s services for years and survive off the land, collecting bird feathers, painting shells, gathering and selling mussels, and buying sardines and saltines from a jolly old Black man named “Jumpin’.”
Between the ages of 14 and 22 or so, Kya meets two local studs who just randomly motor through the marsh: one of them is a sort of Dr. Doolittle-meets-Bear Grylls-type who teaches her to read, tells her what her period is, and gets her panties wet. He also sets her on an improbable course to becoming a bestselling author of field guides, somehow. The other is a swaggering Tom Brady playboy/sex pest from town who swoops in to run game after Doolittle bounces to Chapel Hill for his marine biology degree. Tom Brady meets an untimely and suspicious end, and the rest is what it is.
After roasting this book in a brief earlier post, someone sent me an article in Slate about the author. Apparently, she’s wanted for questioning in Zimbabwe in connection with the murder of an elephant poacher? And there’s also a New Yorker article about it? Serious Tiger King/Gorillas in the Mist vibes! Definitely not the stuff of a LIVELAUGHLOVE publicity tour, let’s admit. I skimmed the ten-zillion word New Yorker report and it’s a whodunnit that’s more like a the author’s stepsondunnit. Three white interlopers buy a one-way ticket to Africa to save the elephants and righteously murder a poacher?
This angle turns a benign little beach read into a chilling memoir and basically saved the entire fucking thing for me. If you have 17 hours to spend glued to a hate-read and its salacious backstory, this one’s for you!
