Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens

After hearing so many great things about Where the Crawdads Sing, I was excited to receive it in a bulk book mailing from a friend. And it started out pretty good for me. I liked the setting. And I was pretty emotionally invested in young Kya. How could I not be? Kya is six years old when her mother walks away from her family and never looks back.

Her mother turns out to be the glue that was holding her family of two brothers, two sisters, father and mother together in the backwater marsh of coastal North Carolina. Once her mother is gone, Kya's two older sisters and older brother in turn leave the home and the youngest siblings, Jodie (13) and Kya (6) in the hands of their abusive father. After Jodie takes an additional beating, he realizes he can also not stay and leaves Kya alone. 

Kya is smart and lithe and she's able to stay out of her father's way for the most part. They make amends of sorts and even spend a couple months together where her father teachers her to fish and navigate the marsh. But when her father is reminded of the mother that left and forced to face his own failings, he reverts to his drunken ways and then disappears for good. 

Kya is well and absolutely alone at the age of 7. She walks miles to the grocery store only to be treated with scorn and derision by the town folk. And this is essentially the life that Kya scratches out for years - interacting only occasionally with Jumpin and his wife Mabel, a pair that run a dry goods and boat fuel spot on the marsh. Living in colored town, Mabel and Jumpin understand how secluded Kya actually is and they understand her ostracism from the towns people. So Kya digs mussels and delivers them to Jumpin for cash payment. And in this way she survives on grits and turnip greens.

When she is 13, she re-encounters a friend of her brother Jodie's - Tate. Tate has an odd fascination with Kya and befriends her, teaching her to read and bringing her books to slowly expand her world into science and nature. Kya already knows so much about the marsh. She has become an avid collector of bird feathers, shells, grasses etc. But now she gains the scientific background to go with it. 

Tate though eventually has to go to college and so he, like so many people before, abandons Kya even as their relationship was starting to take a serious romantic turn. And this is probably when I stopped being able to overlook all the things that just didn't work about this book.

Because the problem is not with Kya, or with Tate, but with the writing. I know this was Owens' first fiction novel and while she clearly researched the marsh portions and had a knack for writing about nature, the dialogue in this book was really stunted and awkward. The language jumps from vernacular to standard English it seems on a whim. 

The author is constantly telling instead of showing. The book suffered from an overindulgence of unnecessary attempts at character development. Tate and Kya both like poetry, okay. But towards the end, Kya is often reciting her favorite "Amanda Hamilton" poems. Amanda Hamilton does not exist, she's made up for the purposes of the book, which would be a spoiler to say much more about except that the poetry is not very good and it is constantly appearing in the text to no purpose except to serve a plot point later on in the story. A plot point that would have been better served not to be set up with mediocre poetry. 

Lastly, as a lawyer, the courtroom scenes were extremely difficult to read. So the entire last part of the book was a big disappointment for me. 

I hope Owens continues to write. She's likely to get a second book advance based on the returns for this one alone. And it would be nice to see her writing improve as she goes into a new topic. Maybe next time without poetry.

2.5/5 Stars