Where the Crawdads Sing

The way her fierce fight for survival against neglect, judgement, and loneliness was portrayed hit right in the feels beautifully

This is such Goodreads-core fodder, one for Book Twitter girls to woo and fawn over while they project themselves onto the reclusive Kya as she has two absurdly attractive men fight for her hand as she barely says a word; the female equivalent to Ryan Gosling in Drive and Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver. Not to dump on the movie entirely, but I feel a lot of character was lost here in the translation to film; characters that I'm sure have depth and layers have been reduced to one note cliches. This only enhances the YA love-triangle feel that really drags the movie down into pulp fiction when I feel it's swinging for American Classic literature. DEJ is still great though, and David Strathairn did well with the napkin script he was given, and it surely is a looker of a movie with some of the shots of the marsh. But what we're left with is the structure of something that could be great, a mystery that pulls you in firmly but devolves to young adult nonsense for the majority of the runtime. The high review score on here is frankly shocking.