Where the Crawdads Sing: Reese's Book Club Hardcover – August 14, 2018

Count me among the thousands of readers who think ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is a wonderful tale and a joy to read. Kya is such a delightful character. Abandoned by her mother at the age of six, she is both sweet and resourceful. Her father is the impetus for the abandonment, a wounded veteran of WW2, he tries to drown his problems in drunken rages. Kya’s Ma can’t take the abuse he dishes out anymore, and she leaves their home, a shack in coastal Carolina, behind. Eventually all the siblings also take off, one by one, for parts unknown and Kya must deal with her drunken Pa in the wild marshland. Basically, the little girl learns to fend for herself, growing up with the animals and birds as her tutors and playmates. She becomes known around town as the Marsh Girl.I enjoyed Part 1, where Kya slowly matures into a teenage woman. This is a little better than Part 2, where Kya has to endure the cruel prejudices and indifference of the townspeople. Both parts contain excellent writing, painting pictures of the environment with remarkable prose. But this book is much more than pretty words. The plot is captivating, drawing me in and pushing me forward to chapter after chapter with a curiosity for what will happen next. Kya finds love with Tate, only to be deserted by another that she cares for. She later finds love again, this time with Chase. But this time she is rejected in a different way, and she endures an atrocity that is both confusing and heartbreaking to her innocent mind. One of the best characters is Jumpin, proprietor of the wharf boat dock and friend to Kya when she was rejected by everyone else. Later, Kya tells Jumpin some of what Chase had done to her, and I thought he would come to her aid in Part 2. Perplexing. But the small holes in this story are easily overlooked. A solid five star read should induce emotions from the reader and in the best books the characters should make a real connection. ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is populated by some of the most endearing characters that I have known.

This was an enjoyable read. i found it interesting to keep up with the story line.

This story is in two parts in one book. I appreciate the map at the beginning of the book. The story begins by putting you in a well-described swamp and then reveals a tragedy.In the next chapter, we jump back in time to the story's beginning. The story's main character is very young, and her family is on the fringes of society in this marsh wasteland. Her plight and heritage are well described.Like Chase, the nearby town boy, we get other characters in Kya's daily life. Her interconnections are far and few between, but we have a few dependent characters like Jumpin, Mable, and Tate. We jump back and forth in the timeline. Is this story a murder mystery fiction?As Kya's life and years continue, we learn important information about her struggles and surroundings.As we start the second part of this story, Kya is a grown woman, just about adult age. Her coming-of-age is filled with adventure, friendships, and living off the land.The murder mystery and romance in this book's second part are intriguing. The evidence is being made to point to Kya, but is it really? The book certainly pulls on your sympathetic emotions. Even grown up and now in her 20s, her story of abandonment and survival is riveting.The courtroom presiding part is excruciating to read, revealing the reader's heavy basis toward Kya. However, the results are fascinating. This book ends quite unexpectedly, and Kya and Tate finally get their happy lives, but even at the end, it takes a turn for the unexpected. You can hypothesize all you want on the who did it mystery, but it never outright tells you exactly. Unfortunately, the end theory isn't hard evidence. It never reveals precisely what happened in the storyline.

“Go as far as you can—way out yonder where the crawdads sing.”I am fairly skeptical of those books that are very hyped up to the max and have high ratings galore with the masses singing their praises. I have gone into some of those books and felt quite let down and disappointed by the novel’s end. However, this was not the case at all with Delia Owen’s popular novel Where the Crawdads Sing, a novel that breaches into various genres and themes: coming of age, romance, mystery, courtroom drama.1969. The quiet, small North Carolina town Barkley Cove is astir and up in arms when one of its popular locals, Chase Andrews, is found dead. Suspected of the crime is Kya Clark, who has been dubbed the “Marsh girl” because she has isolated herself out in the marsh away from the town and the public.Owens formats this novel so we are constantly shifting around through the past and fast forwarding to various years, and this allows us to “fill in the pieces” of what has taken place in this small community. Through this structure, we get to see Kya’s childhood as well as the communities’ reaction to her and the choices she has made along the way.During the years in the past, we come to know that her mother left her at an early age and never came back, and her abusive father also left her, along with her brother, who joined the military. Left to fend on her own, Kya becomes resourceful and visits Jumpin’ and Mabel, a kind couple who own a store and become parental-type figures to help Kya survive and provide help. Kya also comes to know and be involved with two of the boys who are her age, Tate Walker and Chase Andrews, who form a love triangle of sorts and forms the basis for the mystery at hand.I think this book does have a few flaws, but I tended to forgive them because I just enjoyed pretty much everything else. I love how the author brings in love of the natural world and how Kya so readily identifies with this world as a source of comfort and means to escape. In many ways, the marsh itself becomes a character symbolizing the solace away from the town gossip.The author also delves into important themes such as isolation and fitting in and finding oneself. I like how she manages to put many of the pieces together to form a picture of the past and present.Overall, I was fairly pleased with Where the Crawdads Sing and will look into more works from this author. It was a very easy read that just flew by and was quite engaging from beginning to end.