Saturday, June 15, 2019

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (audiobook)

genre: fiction, mystery

The marshy world of coastal North Carolina is not just Kya's home, it's her family.  Abandoned to fend for herself while still very young, Kya grows up among the gulls and cattails, deer and mushrooms.  Her relationships with anyone in town are tenuous at best but more usually upsetting, so Kya just keeps to herself. There are two exceptions, though, and as she gets older, those two boys are going to change Kya's world in ways that she can't even imagine.

Haunting and beautiful, this one grabbed me at the first chapter and never let go.  Not because it's an active plot drive-page turner - not at all.  I can understand why some reviewers think it's too slow.  But for me?  I sunk into the beautiful descriptions of Kya's shoreside life and with her exquisite interactions with the world around her, the world that shaped and guided her.  The mystery at the heart of the story, which we revisit as we switch between time periods, always kept me guessing in the best of ways.  The racial tension and small-town-mindedness makes you never feel sure you understand how people will react to things.  What really happened to Chase Andrews, who we meet in the opening scene?  I thought the transitions between Kya's young life and the current day investigation were done so well, I never felt out of sync with the story.  I was so enchanted with Kya's character arc - how her tenacity and curiosity mold her into a passionate and observant lover of all life.  How her relationships are so complicated,  how her childhood trauma manifests itself and how she's able to work through it in a few special circumstances with a few special people.   It was magical to me, this story, with an ending that did not disappoint.

I also wanted to mention that I LOVED the narrator for this audiobook, she plunked me into backwater North Carolina and kept me there, incredibly well done.

Sensitivity warning: attempted sexual violence and descriptive sexual situations

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