The Middle of the Road

A review of Middletide by Sarah Crouch

The mysterious death of Dr. Erin Landry undergirds and provides narrative tension for the story of Elijah Leith’s reluctant homecoming to the small town of Point Orchards in the PNW. Beautiful and brief, Middletide artfully captures the elusive concept of love after loss. Everyone at the center of our story has lost something: Elijah his father, Nakita her husband, Erin her family. The police procedural / crime drama is not the real focus of the novel, but homegrown relationships in all their shapes and forms.

Some of the characters in this novel are well drawn, namely Elijah, but mostly the people feel archetypal. Sheriff Godbout is the crotchety old cop, with his over-eager deputy Jeremy who thinks everything is like Law & Order. Samuel Mills is the Good Preacher, his daughter Nakita the local beauty, and Dr. Landry the alluring outsider. Though there’s nothing really revelatory about these characters, I did enjoy reading this novel and felt that the simplicity of the characters made the pages fly by. Crouch’s prose elegantly brings the woods and waters of Washington state to life. I can tell that this is a loving tribute to the author’s home state.

Several reviewers have taken issue with the representation of American Indians in the novel. Crouch invents a fictional indigenous tribe, the Squalomah, whose reservation butts up to Point Orchards. Nakita, her father Samuel, and a Leith family friend named Chitto are all Squalomah people whose lives intersect with Elijah’s. I have zero experience with American Indian people groups, so I won’t try to speak to how Crouch handles this. There was nothing glaringly “wrong” or offensive to me (but again, I’m a white woman with little to no education on this matter). I’ll only refer you to the author’s prefacing note where she states that her representation in Middletide is inspired by her “personal experiences with the Indigenous people of Lummi and Navajo Nations” (vii).

My biggest let-down with this novel was the rushed ending. We finally got to a criminal trial, and it felt like the book was just trying to wrap it up so we could be done. The prosecutor was the most archetypal character in the entire novel, and he was clearly just there as a plot device with zero attention given to any defining characteristics he may have. A lot of court drama cliches featured in the closing chapters. It didn’t ruin the novel for me, but it was disappointing because it didn’t do the rest of the novel justice (pun not intended).

Overall, this was a really solid debut for Crouch. I recommend it to fans of mystery and small town drama looking for a quick and easy read; it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either.