The Guardian trashed a book that outsold every Booker winner of the decade

Sarah Churchwell reviewed Where the Crawdads Sing for The Guardian in January 2019, a full six months after the book had already become a runaway bestseller in the US. By the time this review landed, Delia Owens had sold over a million copies. Churchwell's negative verdict therefore arrived with all the urgency of a fire truck showing up to critique the ashes. The book was already a cultural phenomenon. This review was a strongly worded letter to a parade that had already passed.

The review calls the prose 'painfully predictable,' which is a fair critical observation delivered with the energy of someone who resents having been assigned the book in the first place. Churchwell spends considerable time noting that the plot twists are obvious, that the nature writing veers into purple territory, and that the courtroom scenes strain credibility. All valid points. But the review never once grapples with why tens of millions of readers connected with this book despite — or perhaps because of — those very qualities. Dismissing mass appeal without attempting to understand it isn't criticism. It's snobbery with a deadline.

Here's what fascinates me about this particular Guardian review: it treats reading as though it were a competitive sport where only the most refined palates deserve a score. Churchwell is a professor of American literature. She brings the full weight of her academic credentials to bear on a novel that most readers bought at airport bookshops. This mismatch — the literary equivalent of sending a sommelier to review a gas station coffee — produces a review that is technically competent but emotionally tone-deaf. She's right that the prose won't win a Booker. She's also reviewing a book that outsold every Booker winner of the past decade combined.

The Guardian has a pattern of assigning commercial fiction to literary critics and then acting surprised when the review reads like a grudge match. You don't send your opera critic to review a county fair karaoke contest and then publish the resulting devastation as though it were insight. Churchwell wrote a perfectly good review of the wrong book — or rather, a review aimed at the wrong audience. The 12 million people who loved Where the Crawdads Sing didn't need The Guardian's permission, and this review reads like it resents that fact.