Review: Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5 Stars. This was our book club selection for this month and I had heard people either love it or they hate it; our book club leaned more towards those who liked or loved it with a couple who did not like it. I fall somewhere in the middle.

I found this book to be hard to get into, but then I hit a point where I couldn't put it down. But then a couple of things at the end stretched things a bit too far for my taste and that disappointed me.

The book starts off with the 1969 discovery of the dead body of Chase Andrews, former star quarterback from the small town of Barkley Cove, NC. It then goes back to 1952 and starts to tell the story of then 6 year old Catherine "Kya" Clark, a young girl who lives in a shack in the marsh with her family. The book is then divided into chapters of present day (1969) as Chase's death is investigated and the past as Kya, aka "Marsh Girl" grows up alone, having been abandoned one family member at a time until she was left to fend for herself at the age of 10, until the two timelines finally intersect in 1969.

It's a remarkable story in many ways. It was hard not to root for Kya, who was quite smart for someone who had only gone to school one day in her life. Though she did have somewhat of a surrogate family, it did seem a bit far-fetched, however, these people left a child to literally grow up on her own.

While the writing style definitely helped with the development of the characters in terms of showing who was poor and uneducated (the marsh people) vs the educated and more sophisticated townsfolk, there were times I felt the use of the southern style of language was distracting and took away from the story. I also got bogged down in some of the more scientific explanations in regards to the mating habits of insects, though I did read after I finished the book Delia Owens is a scientist by trade. Sadly, I glossed over a part of the story in this regard that directly impacts how the book ends.

It's a book I will likely recommend but with the caveats I found it hard to get into and it's a bit technical in places, but overall, it is a really good story for the most part, especially in the middle.

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