Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Now, I had scheduled all the posts till the last one before the year actually ended, so I felt like I technically was not speaking to the people reading my blog. I am still working with a backlist of books I read before but am counting towards the books I read this year just because I could not fit in time to write appropriate reviews. Now that I am writing those reviews, I should do a better job than I thought I would when rushed.

Till this evening, I had not felt the ‘feeling’. I made myself used to write the reviews seated at my dining table, posied appropriately minus distractions. This was something my mother gave up trying to get me to do aeons ago, early in my childhood. If forced to do just that I actually remember chipping off fabric from a chair once. Now, it looks like I am so used to it only for the purpose of this blog, this is where I feel the most legitimate. I feel different enough to make a dent in my overlong list of reviews. I hope I can muster the most accurate representation of my emotions when I got done with these books because they were pretty great. So once again to my old readers and new, Happy New Year! Hope you have a great reading year ahead.

P.S: Have you seen my Mega Stats 2019 yet?

This is yet another book that made its way to my shelves because of all the buzz surrounding it in the past year( or more). I blindly reserved it and began reading without much information about its contents. I did not expect what I got. It was a heart-wrenching story about a girl (later woman) who lived with loneliness, conquered it to an extent and also had to continually battle the repercussions of being without a supportive clan. This is in remote North Carolina in 1960s, and people are less accepting of others who do not toe the line of normalcy.

Kya is left alone to support herself at an extremely young age, she feeds herself, but without literacy or even basic understanding of how money works, she is often in a bind. One or two people offer her a helping hand, and she makes more significant strides on her own. Her sharp but curious mind helps her till she is embroiled in a situation that labels her the prime suspect in a murder investigation. Most of the story is about her surroundings, her life and most of all, her aloneness. It was a pretty great atmospheric read but just failed to hit that five-star mark for me. I did not cry for Kya at the appropriate times, which usually is a foregone conclusion when reading such books. This does not mean I did not like the book, I really enjoyed visiting a time, place and type of people I had not encountered in my reading before.

The narrative is very immersive in the sights and sounds of these marshes, and as we are to learn later, Kya knows more about the land that anyone else with better credentials.

I would recommend this to those who like to read non-war-related historical fiction.

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