Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens - ★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Delia Owens

GENRE: Historical Mystery.

RATING: 3.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: This went better than I had expected, because I had zero expectations. 😉 I loved some parts, but found some other parts preposterous. So mixed feelings overall, being just a little bit tilted towards the positive side. Whether and how much you enjoy this book will strictly depend on what you focus upon while reading it.

Story:

The book has two distinct timelines that merge towards the end.

1969. The body of a popular local young man named Chase Andrews is discovered in the swamp. There seem to be no obvious clues about how he died, but the Sherriff and his assistant suspect murder. The only suspect is a young girl Kya Clark, who stay in the marsh, isolated from “civilised” society. This timeline focusses on the investigation.

The other timeline begins from 1952 and works its way towards 1969 and beyond. This timeline shows the background of Kya, beginning from when she was six years old. Abandoned by every member of her family, Kya has just the marsh and its resident creatures for company for many years. Two young men enter her life for two separate purposes, but Kya soon learns that she might be better off not having expectations from anyone.

Where does life take Kya? Is she innocent or guilty?

This book has always generated highly polarised reviews, and I was almost on the verge of throwing it out of my TBR last month. But as luck would have it, its winning the BOTM poll in my Facebook group made it mandatory reading for me. I can now understand the varying reactions it provokes. Let me return to my earlier sentence: “Whether and how much you enjoy this book will strictly depend on what you focus upon while reading it.”

If you are the kind of reader who loves lush descriptions of nature and a vivid portrayal of every scene, you will find loads to enjoy in the book. The picture of nature that she creates is brilliant, almost unparalleled. One can see how much of a nature lover the author is. (Her scientific background helps too.) Every aspect of the story that is connected to nature is mesmerising in its comprehensiveness and its intricacies. At the same time, there can be too much of a good thing. I enjoyed the descriptions for some time but then found myself jumping over them like a runner races across hurdles. Filtering out the plot from the natural details is an easy task for any avid reader. One good thing is that the excessive detailing doesn’t make the book as slow as I had assumed.

If you were the kind of reader who picked this up because it is also touted as a “murder mystery”, sorry to disappoint you but there is hardly any mystery. Again, if you are an avid reader, the whole plot surrounding the murder is blatantly obvious. To add to the issue, there is a lot of hoohah over whether Kya committed the crime, and then there’s a final twist about who actually committed it. But does it reveal how exactly the crime was committed? Nope! What was the point of its being a murder mystery then? A mystery is not just a killer and a victim but also the modus operandi, which we readers never get to sink our teeth into.

If you are the kind of reader who has, for lack of a better phrase, a “poetic soul”, you might enjoy this book. Even beyond the paeans being sung to the marsh, there are many poems scattered throughout the narrative. To the correct target reader, this will be a soul-satisfying experience. (I don’t think it will come as a big shock to my close friends if I say that I am not in this category. I skipped over every single poem except the very last one!)

If you are the kind of reader who considers character development as integral to the narrative as the imagery and scene development, you might end up disappointed. Kya is the only main character, and her portrayal comes across as larger than life in many ways. My heart did go out for her, the way she was left behind by everyone she loved. Her pain seemed very real and as a little child left alone like that, she won me over. But soon her portrayal went way over the top. With just a local boy teaching her how to read when she entered her tween years, she becomes an expert pseudo-scientist and author. She pens impressive poems. She paints amazingly realistic sketches of the marsh and its denizens. It just seemed unbelievable. To be a prodigy in one area while being educated is difficult enough, and here we have a girl who went to school for just ONE day of her life, is educated in the alphabet and numbers by a teenager, and yet graduates to reading academic textbooks, recognises shells by their Latin names, and knows about grasses, shells, mushrooms, birds, tides & currents, and every other aspect of the marsh! Not to forget that she doesn’t own a single cookbook and has no one in her life to guide her about cooking (nor does she ask anyone), and yet we find her improving on her cooking skills as well. Kya is the only character who actually develops as the story progresses, but her development goes from level zero to level 100 with no in-between. You expect me to believe that a marsh girl who never ever went to school understood Einstein's concepts of gravitational energy simply through reading? Quite implausible.

The rest of the characters are quite uni-dimensional. The secondary characters fall neatly into slots: good person (Jumpin, Mabel, the lawyer, the publisher,…) or good person making one mistake (Tate, Jodie, Kya’s mom) or bad person (Chase, many townspeople,…) There is no layer or depth to any of the characters. They are either loveable or “slappable”.

The uniqueness of the book lies in these points:

1. That it has a young girl battling the world alone, á la Tarzan of the marsh.

2. That it provides the voice to a character who is rarely given a dominant role in fiction: a person belonging to the so-called “white trash” section of society. It's like hearing from Mayella Ewell from “To Kill a Mockingbird” but in a more polished way.

3. That it has one of the most beautifully penned elements of the marsh and other aspects of natural beauty.

This could have been a memorable read for me but the core content got buried under the showiness and the exaggeration outweighed the realism. I am more of a plot+character reader than a lyrical prose lover, so the book didn’t satisfy me on the points that matter most to me. Having low expectations helped tremendously.

3.25 stars from me. (I liked it, but didn’t love it.)