How do I describe this masterful writing? It’s a debut novel about a lonely, nature-loving girl. It’s a best seller. I usually avoid reading those titles although I check the list weekly. This book surpasses them all. Oh, I almost forgot, several respected friends recommended this title to me. Was there too much hype about this book? I waited and decided to finally read it when it was gifted to me.
Where the Crawdads Sing reminds me of the language in Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. With each of these books, I couldn’t read in my usual fast pace. I had to read and re-read passages to fully immerse myself in the images these brilliant writers create.
Delia Owens caught me about 100 pages in with her purposeful repetition and alliteration. “And when a swell surged beneath them, his thighs brushed against hers and her breathing stopped.” Can’t you feel the waves and the sexual tension? She captured my attention and held it until the last page.
From that quoted sentence on, I didn’t want to put the book down, but I did stop reading to savor each scene, relive each emotion she wove around Kya, her main character. I could sense every detail of nature as well as the human emotion in this girl so unlike me. Somehow the author made her relatable.
The truths Owens revealed on each page are universal. We all feel alone and unwanted sometimes. Most of us readers have lives different from this isolated child who grew to womanhood almost totally self-reliant.
I wanted to adopt Kya, to reach her and teach her about companionship she intuited intimately, but which she only witnessed in deer and insects and the creatures around her beloved marsh. This book is not about nature alone: it is about how nature explains human life if we are only as observant as Kya was.
This slow-moving lyrical plot and complex character development sneaked up on me like a swarm of flying insects I want to ignore. But I could not abandon this book; it drew me in until the last word on the final page. The memory of it will live after I pass it on to a family member who wants to read it next.
How can we be lonely when we have authors like Delia Owens who draw us into the world where the crawdads sing? What a gift to me and to all who read this book.
Happy Summer Reading!
Best Books By Beth 