Book: Middletide
Author: Sarah Crouch
Publisher: Atria Books
Year: 2024
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “One peaceful morning, in the small Puget Sound town of Point Orchards, the lifeless body of Dr. Erin Landry is found hanging from a tree on the property of prodigal son and failed writer Elijah Leith. Sheriff Jim Godbout’s initial investigation points to an obvious suicide, but upon closer inspection, there seem to be clues of foul play when he discovers that the circumstances of the beautiful doctor’s death were ripped straight from the pages of Elijah’s own novel.
Out of money and motivation, thirty-three-year-old Elijah returns to his empty childhood home to lick the wounds of his fertile writing career. Hungry for purpose, he throws himself into restoring the ramshackle cabin his father left behind and rekindling his relationship with Nakita, the extraordinary girl from the nearby reservation whom he betrayed but was never able to forget.
As the town of Point Orchards turns against him, Elijah must fight for his innocence against an unexpected foe who is close and cunning enough to flawlessly frame him for murder. For fans of Where the Crawdads Sing, this scintillating literary suspense seeks to uncover a case of love, loss, and revenge.”

Review : Okay, Middletide is my first DNF (did not finish) of the year. And while I would normally not review a book I didn’t finish, I’m trying to be better about reviewing every advanced reader copy I get this year; while this may be a shorter review than most, I’m going to let you know why I chose not to finish this one. I had immediate red flags right from the start with the author’s note to the reader explaining that while Sarah Crouch took inspiration from the Lummi and Navajo Nations, the indigenous group she writes about is fictional. There was something about fictionalizing a group of people that didn’t sit quite right with me, something that continued to itch at the back of my mind as Crouch introduced us to Nakita and her father, to members of the fictional Indigenous group who also happen to be Christians (her father being the Christian pastor on the fictional reservation). The more I think about it, the more it rubs me the wrong way. Not only was the narrative not served by a white woman writing in a fictionalized Indigenous narrative, but the insistence that they be Christian rather than connected to their Indigenous beliefs felt off balance, at best. I think it’s also worth mentioning that Crouch wrote Nakita as living in a three story home on the reservation, take that how you will.

Crouch puts a great deal of emphasis on her main character, Elijah, being a homesteader; surely through her long-winded descriptions of the food he makes for himself and the plant-life that surround his small off-the-grid-esque cabin she earned the “for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing” title from the synopsis. However, if you’ve been here for a while you might remember that I gave WTCS a 2.5 stars for it’s lyrical writing and I still chose to give Middletide half a star less. Where WTCS crafted an effortlessly beautiful story full of natural elements and wonder, Middletide felt like effort. Crouch included so many drawn out descriptions of Elijah’s food that it became repetitive and frustrating early on, but when Elijah began killing his own food with equally long winded discussions about his bow and arrow, well, this vegan was out.

**Spoilers Ahead**

I was willing to overlook and plow through some of the frustrations I’d come across, hoping to find a quality murder mystery at the heart of this debut novel, but when the narrative took a swift turn into the unbelievable, I flipped to the end, discovered the twist I predicted immediately was true, and shut the book. Crouch asks the reader not to suspend belief, but to be so carried away by cozy conversations about food that we forget the nature of the characters she’s crafted for the reader. When the narrative changes on a dime, it becomes hard to reconcile who we’ve come to see with what she’s asking us to believe – and the real kicker is, if you’ve been reading thrillers for some time, it’s especially hard to reconcile because the plot eerily mirrors another’s work. Jumping from Elijah’s third person narrative to the diaries of a woman he’s been seeing, Crouch asks us to believe that Elijah has been an unreliable narrator and instead believe the diary entries we’re reading, which do not correspond with the third-person telling we’ve been getting until this point. I have a hard time with this, as Crouch is asking us to believe that she is the unreliable narrator as the author of a third-person narrative. Had Elijah’s perspective been first person, I would have had an easier time believing his account might not be entirely truthful, and the twist would have taken hold. Instead, the diary entries we read are so out of sync with what we’ve come to know over one hundred-some pages that it’s impossible to believe them, which is unfortunate because the plot twist reminded me immediately of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. And sure enough, when I flipped to the back of the book…the diary entries were faked in order to frame Elijah for murder.

Advice : This book certainly has an audience that I think might enjoy it, and if you fall into the homesteading, living off the land, the main characters date but don’t even kiss for months, kind of camp, well this might be for you. If you aren’t, or you’ve read Gone Girl, don’t bother. You already know how it ends.