Where the Crawdads Sing: A Reese's Book Club

I loved every word. My heart aches for Kya. A gentle heart in a cold world. I would recommend this to anyone.

Read before watching the movie. Now we've passed it between my mom, my sister and myself!

This book is more than just another page turner. It’s a deep analysis of human nature within nature. It has beautiful imagery and poetry, romantic love and elements of a survival story. It gives the reader a sense of how we are all connected to each other and to nature. It’s also unpredictable. Like life, it keeps us guessing until the end. I recommend it to everyone who loves to read stories about being human. Read this book!

Raw and heart wrenching. Real and true. Love lost and found. Beautiful language. A lovely book.One for the bookshelf.

This was an excellent read and it amazes me how she survived during these times. Thor’s exhibits strength, courage and resilience. She had to raise herself and in the end she had to protect herself as well. She was smart in being a marsh girl and used her labels that people put on her wisely.

Her mother left when she was 5, 3 of her older siblings soon after. Then a few years later Jodie, the brother she was closest to. All leaving their abusive husband/father. All leaving Kya alone with him. Eventually her father left too, leaving her alone in the house in the marsh with no income.Her only friends became Jumpin’, who ran the store where she got gas and supplies. His wife Mabel, who “traded” her smoked fish for clothes, and Tate, Jodie’s friend who taught her how to read and count past 29 and who was here first love.Town big shot and football hero Chase is found dead at the bottom of the fire tower and Kya is the prime suspect.Told in 2 perspectives-Kya’s life growing up in the marsh alone and being ostracized by the majority of the town’s inhabitants. And Chase’s murder investigation and trial.This book with tug at your heartstrings.

I enjoyed this book very much! Later I watched the movie, and I would suggest reading the book first.

This book was amazing and i fully recommend it to everyone. The writing was truly beautiful and it kept me immersed.

The narrative's fluidity and descriptive richness, capturing minute details like feathers, insects, and shells, effectively conveyed the Marsh Girl's passion for nature. It was excellent.

This was an excellent book. Was very different from most books as it covered areas that most would not know.

I’m not an avid reader, but I’ve recently been trying to make a habit of it. I’ve read four books this month (The Help, The Book Thief, Secret Life of Bees) and this was the last book on my list. I had never seen the movie, and I had always heard this story was popular, so I decided to give it a try. I’ve finished this book in LESS than 10 hours. I simply could not put it down! The story is so compelling, moving, inspiring, heavy, emotional, sad, but somehow still beautiful. I loved it every minute of reading it. If you’re trying to make a habit of reading and don’t know where to start, start here.You won’t regret it.

I’ve put off reading this book for years and wish I hadn’t. This book sucked me in and kept me reading til the very end. I do say, the beginning was a bit slow but it was crucial for the rest of the story. Every detail and every character was written extremely well. You either loved them or hated them, she got you exactly where she wanted you. And the twist at the end made you sit there for a moment and think. Definitely recommend.

“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.

I did not see the 2022 movie, but all the chatter about it made me buy the novel.Kya Clark’s family lived isolated in the North Carolina coastal marshes. She was the youngest of five children. When she was six, her Ma fled from her abusive husband. One by one, her much older siblings also left the home, until Kya was left alone with her neglectful alcoholic father, who frequently disappeared for days at a time.She goes to school for one day, but it doesn’t go well. She realizes she can’t go to school, because then she’ll be put into a foster home. She learns to evade the Child Services people. She’s really not welcome in town, where people consider her a dirty marsh rat, not fit for polite company.For a period of time, Pa doesn’t drink, and life goes well for them. Kya cleans the house and teaches herself how to cook from her memories of Ma in the kitchen. Pa takes Kya fishing with him. She daydreams that her Ma will come back and the three of them will have an idyllic life together in the marsh. A letter comes from Ma; Pa reads it, burns it, and leaves. When he comes back days later, his sobriety is over, and Ma never does come home.And when Kya’s ten, Pa doesn’t return from one of his absences.Kya discovers she can gather mussels and smoke fish she’s caught and sell them to Jumpin’, the man who runs a little store on the wharf. Then she can use the money to buy everything she needs from his store. Jumpin’ and his wife Mabel help Kya to get by, teaching her how to plant and care for a garden, making sure she has clothes suitable for her needs.A boy she met out on the water becomes a good friend to her, offering her gifts of interesting feathers, teaching her how to read. She teaches herself to draw and paint the birds and insects, flora and fauna of the marsh. Tate introduces her to poetry, and eventually she becomes proficient at writing, and some of her poems are accepted for publication, as well as books.A young man, well-respected in the town, falls from the fire tower to his death. The investigators suspect foul play, and the young woman who grew up wild in the marsh, Kya, becomes their prime suspect. She’s eventually arrested, but she’s acquitted at trial. She ultimately becomes Tate’s common law wife and they live out their days alone in the marsh.Author Delia Owens is a wildlife biologist who spent a lifetime doing research in Africa. She is the co-author with Mark Owens of three volumes of nonfiction: Secrets of the Savanna, The Eye of the Elephant, and Cry of the Kalahari. In Where the Crawdads Sing, her vivid descriptions make the marsh one of the characters of the story. Her use of words is nothing short of beautiful. As for the mystery, I was guessing (wrong) through to the very end of the book.

What I liked most about this book is the depictions of believably real (though fictional) characters challenged by real-life issues, with the characters' basic motivations well described and integrated into a story of how the characters succeed or fail against their challenges, and why. I believe the philosophical term for literature of this kind is "metaphysical values."(I haven't seen the movie so far but probably will see it eventually. Meanwhile, the various trailers that I've seen seem to indicate that the novel's main spirit may have been badly mangled in the movie, possibly to emphasize issues such as racial prejudice and other forms of bias against those who are "different," and other contemporary concerns. From various critical reviews on this website, it also appears that the story itself may have greatly misrepresented what North Carolina was actually like in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. But I don't see geographical or historical accuracy as necessarily essential to a fictional story concretizing important metaphysical values.)At the end of the novel, in the Q&A with the author (pp. 376-377), there is a very concise description of what the book is about. The story follows the life of a young girl named "Kya" living mostly alone in fictional marshlands in North Carolina from age 6 to her death from natural causes (unexpected heart failure) at age 64. It's a story of how she survives with minimal help from anyone else. A child of 6 wouldn't have been able to survive alone for long without significant knowledge and experience gained from interaction with other humans, and she did receive minimal interaction with her mother, brother, father, brother's friend Tate (later Kya's first lover and eventual husband after a fateful 2nd love with Chase Andrews), and a married (black) couple in the nearby fictional town of Barkley Cove. Tate and Chase both disappoint Kya deeply, Chase so strongly that Kya becomes the prime suspect when Chase is found dead, apparently murdered. (Chase lied to her about potentially marrying her, and he even tried to rape her, causing her to fear that Chase would keep trying again and again by force.) Before Tate leaves her while he goes to college, she learns to read with Tate's help. He also gives her many old books to read, mostly on life science. She apparently never receives access to any books in literature, history, philosophy, or other general humanities subjects. She remains forever shy and defensive toward most other people despite becoming highly adept at studying the wild animals and plants in the marsh, writing books of her own on her observations, becoming successful as a published author, and painting vivid sketches of what she observed. Along the way, she also learns to count beyond 29 and to count money and make change, again with help from Tate and others.At her trial for the murder of Chase, the prosecution presents serious evidence against her, but the evidence isn't quite strong enough to obtain a guilty verdict from the jury (beyond reasonable doubt). She has an especially good alibi, although it has weaknesses that leave room to doubt her innocence. Since there are also reasonable doubts about her guilt, the jury verdict is "not guilty." One key piece of evidence, a "shell necklace," remains missing until the very last page of the story, shortly after Kya's death, when Tate (whom she had married by then) finds it. For those who want to be surprised, I won't say more about the details of the ending. Kya certainly would have had to be incredibly resourceful and daring, perhaps far larger than real life, to have been able to construct such a convincing alibi, if she actually was the murderer. The symbolic parallel to the mating rituals of fireflies provides a strong hint about Kya's mental state.The events of the story are mainly just the backdrop. The story's main focus is on how Kya felt and how she learned so much about nature and life sciences from her own direct observations and from books that she read, without ever attending school at any level for more than one deeply unpleasant day at age 6. Despite how little she learned about humanities subjects and how to deal with other people, the story depicts her as focused on the reality that she was exposed to, and on how she used her natural intellectual capacity to make sense of it as best she could. She certainly functioned on a reality-is-real premise, though without explicitly identifying that premise or comprehending its higher implications for human living; she also felt her emotions without any explicit appeal to any greater mysticism or other-worldly perspective. (Kya shows no superstitiousness or religious worship of natural phenomena.) But the story doesn't attempt to delve further than that into issues of values, why man needs them, and how best to choose and pursue one's values. With access to books, Kya surely would have had the opportunity to do such deeper reading in re...

I'm an avid reader and tend to read more literary fiction by contemporary writers, or mystery fiction by British, Irish, and Scandinavian writers (a lot of American mystery series are very one dimensional).Typically I find a lot of best sellers are pretty one dimension too, but they make for great Netflix or HBO series, or films (Big Little Lies, Sharp Objects, etc.). Anyway - I really didn't want to read this book because so many people liked it, but sometimes a great book ends up being a massive hit - Gone Girl was really good, The Midnight Library, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (I still love Scandinavian Crime Fiction thanks to this International hit).But for some reason, the last few years, I kept putting this book in my cart, then taking it out, then reading reviews and putting it back in, then reading other reviews and taking it out. Needless to say, I was going to not ever read it, but my husband who doesn't typically read fiction but who loves the coast of our state - NC - wanted to read it. So we decided to read it together which was such a new and awesome experience. This is what is good and bad about the book in my opinion:Good:The description of the landscape. The author is a nonfiction / naturalist and zoologist / ecology writer, so she had amazing description of the animals, marshes, and coast. You could really get lost in these descriptions and this is probably the best thing about the book.Kya - the protagonist - is a survivor and a character you root for because she's been treated so badly - by her family and everyone else. She's an interesting character in that her loneliness leads her to her passion for the marshes and coast, and as an introvert myself who would rather be alone than around people at times - I envied her isolated shack near the beach and her ability to just hang out exploring the coast all day.Kya's friendship with Jumpin' and Mabel - they are both warm hearted characters who help Kya when she is young and are almost like adoptive parents to her, although they don't impede too much on her life. I liked their bond and thought it was plausible.The metaphors the author uses between the animal / natural world and Kya's life / experiences. These were interesting, and definitely "in your face" as you were reading, but I learned things about the natural world I didn't know before and a few of the comparisons made me think which I always appreciate.The bad:The dialogue is not believable at all. Characters speak like they are living in the same Louisiana Parish as the characters from "Steel Magnolias," and even though these are Southern folks who might be more isolated on the coast - and it's the 60s - no one speaks like this in NC (the accent). Also - characters always speak in full sentences to one another and explain their thoughts and feelings as if they are all very emotionally mature and well rounded people rather than broken and dysfunctional. Kya doesn't really speak like this most of the time, but everyone else does. People just don't speak like this to one another - in full sentences, and able to explain their thoughts and feelings so clearly - right in the moment. If this were the case, we would all be in a much more peaceful world. Communication is hard in the real world - especially when you are hurting and broken. The way the characters explain everything they are thinking so well and in full sentences makes the book kind of cheesy at times and almost like a YA read. This aspect of the book just didn't go with the landscape descriptions.The love triangle:It's pretty typical that in most popular books featuring a romance, you'll have the love triangle with the awkward yet beautiful chic in the middle - loved by two men. I understand it's value to drive suspense, but Tate and Chase both end up being kind of douches.Things just don't make sense in a lot of ways:No snakes in this book? Asheville as a destination from the Coast? No one in town trying harder to help this girl who everyone knows lives on her own? Some things just don't add up, including the mystery itself and why the Sheriff wants to pin it on Kya so much when his life would be easier if he just called it an accident as it looked to be anyway. I think she was capable enough of raising herself based on her ability to feed herself and the friends she made along the way, but she never really got hurt - other than the nail which doesn't seem plausible.Overall - I'm looking forward to seeing the film because I absolutely love the landscape in this story and want to see Kya's shack and the way she interacts with nature which is the best thing about this story. The book was uneven to say the least, and it's certainly not going to be on the AP English literature reading list one day. But it has a protagonist that most people would love to root for, and the setting is great.For a book featuring atmospheric natural landscape descriptions and interesting characters with unique experiences, as well as literary pro...

Where the Crawdads Sing is well worth staying up all night to read. The midnight fireworks marked a significant moment in the book which definitely would be a spoiler!Kya is abandoned by her mother and siblings who leave her at age six with an abusive drunk. As marsh-dwellers, she and her family live as total outsiders from the world of small-town Bible Belt North Carolina in the mid-1950s. Once her protectors leave her, Kya's world becomes darker and more dangerous.She stays on the good side of her father long enough to learn to fish before he goes off the wagon and disappears for good. Kya learns to feed and clothe herself with the loving help of a Black swamp storekeeper and his wife. She avoids the truant officers until she is 8 when she is put into a class far above her skills with students who bully and disdain. It is her first and last day of school. She prevents authorities from learning she is alone because she is terrified she will be removed from the marshland that is her entire world.She is alone but she learns how to avoid loneliness. Yet she yearns for a family again, for her mother's songs and art and gaiety—when it was safe to laugh and play. She misses the last brother she remembers well, who abandoned her with her sullen and explosive father. When not struggling to feed herself and to earn money for gas for the boat and staples for the household, Kya builds her collections: exotic feathers, shells, nests, butterflies. She draws and paints and studies the habits of insects, of birds, of marsh animals. She learns the tides, the currents outside the lagoon, the weather. But she knows little of people except that they are unkind if not cruel, often dangerous—never trustworthy. After all, if her own family has abandoned her, who can she trust?Then she meets Tate, who also loves the marshland, who appreciates her flock of gulls, who is a collector of marsh artifacts and creatures. Slowly she learns to trust him, allows him to teach her what he knows, accepts the books that he uses to teach her to read. Kya grows into the world Tate offers, a world of knowledge and art and possibilities. Kya is just beginning to realize what love might be—could be—when Tate leaves for college. And like all the others, he does not return.It is when she is most financially and physically secure that Kya becomes the most vulnerable. She meets Chase and the life and career she has built as an author and naturalist fall apart, to the cruel delight of the town who have been waiting for years to see the Marsh Girl finally get her comeuppance.I recommend Where the Crawdads Sing to readers who enjoy solid character development, rich description, and learning of new places and information without feeling "taught." Delia Owens imparts knowledge lovingly—no didactics. Kya's observations widen your world as they widen hers.Kya's growth as a whole person is gradual as she learns to trust, learns to love, learns to widen her circle. Her journey is long and hazardous, but those who travel the road with her are enriched and enlightened by Kya's losses, her gains, and her redemption as a human experiencing a wider and highly challenging world.This is not a book a reader will regret choosing. You will be willing to read away the night, even on New Year's Eve.

I wanted to read this book because 1) it’s an unexpected best seller; 2) the descriptions in reviews of how nature played such an important part in the narrative sounded intriguing; and 3) when I read that this is the first novel for the 70+ year-old author, I was hooked.It was a good read. The evidence: I read it almost all on one of those lazy, cold Saturday mornings when I allowed myself the indulgence of putting off working, house-cleaning, bill-paying, cooking, and curled up in bed with a heating pad on my feet. I read till I had to admit that I was starting to doze off, even though it was getting to the good part—the denouement, the reveal about the murder mystery. When I woke up the next morning, I immediately reached for the book and didn’t get out of bed until I finished it. I just HAD to find out how it ended!It was a compelling read, and yet it vacillated between being a fascinating character study and a somewhat cliched romance novel. The main character, Kya, is basically orphaned at age seven, as every one of her family members gradually abandons her—a mother we only get glimpses of in Kya’s memories, a mostly drunk father who beats the joy and the tar out of everyone in the family when under the influence, and all of Kya’s three older siblings.And yet, this tough little thing figures out how to survive, in large part due to the fact that she is truly one with nature. Nature is not just a backdrop to the story, but it is the very essence of the character Kya. She observes nature, collects its artifacts, especially bird feathers and shells, and records her findings—this despite the fact that she does not learn how to read until she is almost a teen-ager. Instead, she draws and paints as a way of recording what she finds. In other words, she is a natural scientist, not unlike the author, Delia Owens. Kya even figures out how to make a living from nature by fishing and gathering mussels and selling them to a local, who becomes a father figure to her.The short bio accompanying the book says that Owens is a zoologist with a Ph.D. in animal behavior, and coauthor of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa. She now lives in the mountains of North Carolina. The book is set in the coastal wetlands of North Carolina, in the marshes. The main character is called the “Marsh Girl” by the many backwoods, small town, redneck-like townspeople who populate the book. It’s hard not to get the feeling that the Marsh Girl is a stand-in for the author, at least in the areas of study that interest the author.Of course, the Marsh Girl triumphs in the end—thanks to an unlikely suitor, a sympathetic young man who teaches her how to read and seems to understand that she is a skittish as a wild animal. He’s her childhood sweetheart before she even knows what a sweetheart is. By the end of the book, the Marsh Girl has not only learned to read and continue her inclination to observe, collect, gather and organize the world of nature around her, but she becomes a regional publishing sensation, the author and illustrator of dozens of books profiling the minutiae of nature in all its forms in the marshes of North Carolina—the birds, the plants, the mushrooms, the shells.A good narrative can’t be without conflict, however. In this story, the Marsh Girl’s outsider status figures prominently, not just in her lack of social standing and social skills, and her conflicts about how to interact with the small community she lives near, but even more so in the men who enter and exit and re-enter her life. It’s these men who are the less credible characters in the narrative. One is a savior, though not exactly a saint, who not only shares Kya’s love of nature and pursues it as a post-doctoral career, but he (and his father) have an appreciation for poetry and opera. The other is a somewhat stereotypical example of a “frat boy”—the kind of guy who has to brag about sexual conquests, even when there’s been no conquest; the kind of guy who will say anything to a girl just to get in her pants.What keeps you reading, besides wanting to find out the story of this unusual, resourceful, fascinating young girl, is the murder mystery, hints of which are woven throughout the book, but culminate in a trial. I couldn’t possibly spoil the ending for those who haven’t read this book yet. But let me tell you—it was totally unexpected!