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chandasolara 's review for:
Where the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens
I don't possess a vocabulary adequate enough to express how much I loved this book.
The story unravels as understated as Kya's journey from the Marsh Girl, feared for the feral, dirty reputation the town builds for her, to a woman renowned in her own right, just as fierce and wild as the nature that rears her. It's a story of survival and resiliency and the unabiding loneliness that abandonment fosters, even when you cling to everything you hold dear with both hands... sometimes it all just slips away like sand through the proverbial hourglass.
Until she meets two boys. One that sees her and the other that has the world handed to him on a silver platter, beloved by everyone. Add to it an unsolved mystery, at the middle of which Kya is inexplicably found. And that is the beginning of her unraveling.
Every bit of this book reeled me in, but there's always one line that seems to steal the show right from the top, and this was the one that did it for me: "Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks." And it carries throughout the whole novel, that singular line underscoring Kya's relationship with herself, her absent family, the marsh, and her flawed redemption.
The lyricism of the prose is perhaps my favorite part of this novel. Owens writes with a command of tone and turn of phrase that both took my breath away and made me desperate to pick up my own pen and try to capture even a singular iota of the emotion she does. Woven with the minutia of the marsh life, I was captured by the coming-of-age story. It was raw. It was heartbreaking. It was hopeful. It was everything I was hoping it would be and more.
I did struggle a bit with the phonetic spelling of the character's speech in the first quarter of the book, as well as connecting the marsh speak to Kya when her mother took great care to try to assimilate her vernacular into something the town would consider acceptable, but it wasn't enough to stop me from flying through the book at breakneck speed.
I can't wait to come back to this book for a second read to soak up all the details that I missed the first time around.
The story unravels as understated as Kya's journey from the Marsh Girl, feared for the feral, dirty reputation the town builds for her, to a woman renowned in her own right, just as fierce and wild as the nature that rears her. It's a story of survival and resiliency and the unabiding loneliness that abandonment fosters, even when you cling to everything you hold dear with both hands... sometimes it all just slips away like sand through the proverbial hourglass.
Until she meets two boys. One that sees her and the other that has the world handed to him on a silver platter, beloved by everyone. Add to it an unsolved mystery, at the middle of which Kya is inexplicably found. And that is the beginning of her unraveling.
Every bit of this book reeled me in, but there's always one line that seems to steal the show right from the top, and this was the one that did it for me: "Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks." And it carries throughout the whole novel, that singular line underscoring Kya's relationship with herself, her absent family, the marsh, and her flawed redemption.
The lyricism of the prose is perhaps my favorite part of this novel. Owens writes with a command of tone and turn of phrase that both took my breath away and made me desperate to pick up my own pen and try to capture even a singular iota of the emotion she does. Woven with the minutia of the marsh life, I was captured by the coming-of-age story. It was raw. It was heartbreaking. It was hopeful. It was everything I was hoping it would be and more.
I did struggle a bit with the phonetic spelling of the character's speech in the first quarter of the book, as well as connecting the marsh speak to Kya when her mother took great care to try to assimilate her vernacular into something the town would consider acceptable, but it wasn't enough to stop me from flying through the book at breakneck speed.
I can't wait to come back to this book for a second read to soak up all the details that I missed the first time around.