Where the Crawdads Sing

I liked this book. The whole time I was reading it I thought "yeah, it's good... it's not great though". So probably 3 stars. The amount of suspension of disbelief asked of the reader was ALMOST more than I was willing to bear. I mean, come on, truthfully, it was VERY unbelievable that a little girl would be able to live alone in the marshland. It was unbelievable that the town folk, the CHURCHES, the STATE would turn a blind eye to this little girl's well being for year after year. I mean, at least they could have dropped off some food, some supplies, whatever. Then when she learned how to read, draw, paint, author books, boat motor never broke down, house never needed dire repairs etc... was almost laughable to the point of ruining the whole thing.

But

I love nature. When I first went to college I was a biology major because I wanted to work for the national park system as a park naturalist. I love birds and wildlife, the flora and fauna of different regions, ecology, taxonomy all that. I can fully believe, since she had nothing else in here life to draw away her attention, the girl Kya fixating on the natural world and studying it closely. I mean her life depended upon it. So I DID like that part of the book a lot and hence my wanting to rate it 3 stars instead of the 2 that all that suspension of disbelief warranted.

But then again, I really liked the ending. I love the thought of making a life apart from the mainstream, quiet contemplation surrounded by nature. and then the very ending, the poem that explains it all, took me by surprise and was just perfect really so I bumped my rating up to 4 stars.

Now some people who are local to that area in North Carolina have issues with the dialect, the nearby cities and towns, etc. and that IS a legitimate gripe to have. Nothing pulls me out of a story quicker than these kinds of flaws of a thing or place that I am well familiar with. Like, author, do your damn homework! But being that I've never been to North Carolina, I was able to just go with the story without being slammed with the inconsistancies or falsehoods of setting.

So, yeah, I enjoyed it because it appealed to my particular personality and obviously my ignorance too. I can see how people could have trouble with this, but for me it worked.

This isn't the type of book I would normally read. My book club selected it. I almost abandoned it at several points early on. It finally engaged me slightly about a third of the way in. It's very well written. I admired that the entire time I was reading it. But it was SLOW!

The book tells the story of Kya, the "Marsh Girl". Her family lives in a shack in a North Carolina marsh. At age 6, her mother and most of her family abandon her. By age 7, her father abandons her too. The book follows her as she fends for herself and grows to adulthood. There are some relationships along the way, if you like that sort of thing. There's even an incident that may or may not be a crime. The latter part of the book revolves around that.

Overall, I don't regret reading it. I would have much preferred spending that time with a different book.

Given what my therapist had said, and when she recommended it, I started the book with much trepidation and no small amount of anxiety. There were certainly some parallels to my youth. Yes,  I cried some. Sometimes for her. Sometimes for me. I laughed at the end.

Along the way, I felt the juxtaposition of the crafted lyrical writing and the back water patois was forced, but it felt right in the end. I'm not sure how to explain why I felt it was forced. It was a sweet,  slow book, well matched to the marshy Atlantic coastal lands in which in took place. I enjoyed it, and some parts will stick with me, but it's not all that high on my list to recommend.

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My therapist said, "It'll be interesting to hear your thoughts on this book."

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I still think back to this book from time to time. I remember the lazy, hot feeling implied in the writing (much like my summer days in Delaware) and the feeling of the ending.

"A man doesn't set up a palmetto lean-to in a bog unless he's on the run from somebody or at the end of his own road."

Well friends, I finished this book. This has been on my to-read list almost since it came out, but I always found reasons to put it off. That didn't stop so many people from telling me I should/need to read it, but that just sort of made me dig my heels in more. It had the dreaded "romance" tag on Goodreads, and those are always hit or miss with me, and that was a good enough reason to keep putting this off. Then my book club decided to read it this month and I ran out of good reasons to put it off, so I ripped the Band-Aid off and finished this in a few days.

I won't bother with a full summary, since there's literally thousands of reviews of this book that all cover the same ground. Suffice it to say that the first half of the book is Shy Marsh Girl in a Modern (for the time period) World, and the second half of the book is Shy Marsh Girl in a Mediocre Courtroom Drama.

If the book had been entirely composed of what was essentially the first half of the book, my rating would've been 4 stars at least. While it definitely had a slow start, I was drawn into how comfortable the writing was and how beautiful the marsh seemed. Kya had a rapport with nature that I found compelling to read about. Her brushes with the rest of the world around her usually went poorly, but she always seemed to rise above whatever hand she was dealt and come out the other side stronger and more skilled.

The first half of the book is told from a dual timeline perspective, and it is when these two periods converge (when Kya's story catches up to the secondary story being slowly revealed during her marsh life) that the book loses me. While I'm sure there's books where courtroom drama is compelling, this one didn't feel like one of those. The scenes felt flat, devoid of the charm and beauty of the first part of the book, and really felt so tonally different that it took me right out of the story. I finished the book, but ultimately left it feeling unsatisfied and wishing I had more time with Kya's story at the end, rather than a sudden and abrupt headlong rush and conclusion.

While it's clear there's many (manymanymanymany) people here who enjoyed it cover to cover, my enjoyment ended at the courtroom intrusion. I'm glad I finally struck this one from my to-read list, I'm glad I read it with friends, but I don't think I'll ever revisit it.

I was pretty skeptical going into this. I knew about it because of ALL THE BUZZ but buzz doesn't generally translate into a high opinion from me. All through the first 3/4s of the novel I was feeling smugly superior to the masses. "See? It's not that interesting," I told myself.

Well I was wrong. The last quarter of the narrative takes what the first 3/4s builds and uses it like rocket fuel. I mean I actually got a physical thrill by the end. That doesn't happen often. So does this novel aspire to grandiose themes of literary merit? I'm not sure it does, though there may be some Caliban allusions. What this novel does aspire to and what it pulls off effectively is a fully realized set of characters doing surprising yet inevitable things. It tells the story of an entire life in a specific area and it fills in everything important.

I have no doubt this story's characters are going to stay with me for a while and I am grateful to Delia Owens for that.