Where the Crawdads Sing: Reese's Book Club Hardcover – August 14, 2018

Count me among the thousands of readers who think ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is a wonderful tale and a joy to read. Kya is such a delightful character. Abandoned by her mother at the age of six, she is both sweet and resourceful. Her father is the impetus for the abandonment, a wounded veteran of WW2, he tries to drown his problems in drunken rages. Kya’s Ma can’t take the abuse he dishes out anymore, and she leaves their home, a shack in coastal Carolina, behind. Eventually all the siblings also take off, one by one, for parts unknown and Kya must deal with her drunken Pa in the wild marshland. Basically, the little girl learns to fend for herself, growing up with the animals and birds as her tutors and playmates. She becomes known around town as the Marsh Girl.I enjoyed Part 1, where Kya slowly matures into a teenage woman. This is a little better than Part 2, where Kya has to endure the cruel prejudices and indifference of the townspeople. Both parts contain excellent writing, painting pictures of the environment with remarkable prose. But this book is much more than pretty words. The plot is captivating, drawing me in and pushing me forward to chapter after chapter with a curiosity for what will happen next. Kya finds love with Tate, only to be deserted by another that she cares for. She later finds love again, this time with Chase. But this time she is rejected in a different way, and she endures an atrocity that is both confusing and heartbreaking to her innocent mind. One of the best characters is Jumpin, proprietor of the wharf boat dock and friend to Kya when she was rejected by everyone else. Later, Kya tells Jumpin some of what Chase had done to her, and I thought he would come to her aid in Part 2. Perplexing. But the small holes in this story are easily overlooked. A solid five star read should induce emotions from the reader and in the best books the characters should make a real connection. ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is populated by some of the most endearing characters that I have known.

Page turner, hard to put down. A sense of loss when finished. Great plot moves with ease, characters seem natural

This was an enjoyable read. i found it interesting to keep up with the story line.

Spoiler warning for the following review. I went into this novel expecting to hate it. I expected an overhyped, over-written novel, and when I read the first few chapters, I thought my assumption had been correct. The writing in the very beginning irritated the hell out of me as a reader, and I had to slog through it. After fifty or so pages, however, I finally began to grow an interest in the story, and this was singlehandedly because of the hint of a relationship in the making for a young Kya and Tate. The romance saved me, giving me cause to continue reading to figure out how things ended, and it was by far more interesting to me than the upbringing and struggles of Kya Clark.As the novel went on, I grew to be more interested in the characters and plot. It was an extreme slow burn, and I honestly found Kya to be rather unlikable. Even though I liked the elements of her character- nature loving, self-made, traumatic background, hard to trust- I still found this uncaring attitude towards her, leaving myself only really interested in what was happening with other characters. To me, this novel mimics the well-loved setting of the south-east of America but lacks a lot of charm in the actual story. So you may be asking, why are you rating it so highly?This novel pulled off a perfect mystery, the way mysteries should be. I am not usually fooled, and maybe you, dear reader, guessed the end of this novel right away, but I did not. It takes clever writing and well-written characters to fool your reader, and that’s what Where The Crawdads Sing accomplished for me. Despite the heavy description and slow start, Crawdads succeeds in making up for the beginning with a great end. The entire legal case was riveting, and the people who were vying for Kya- a girl with a skewed sense of morality after years and years of distrusting others and living on her own- made the final verdict heavy enough to matter. It felt less like standing for Kya and more like standing for all those that cared about her; Her friends, her love, her little patched together family.I also think this novel gives great insight into the human psyche. The moral of the story: Belonging to the wild, belonging to the marsh, and the different rules of the natural world versus the world the rest of us live in. Kya is a different beast, from a different world, and it’s the growth of her character that I love the most. The way she hones her abilities and learns to survive with what she knows, the way she builds a life for herself- these are the reasons I rate this novel so highly. I think it’s a wonderful display of character, for those who can sink into the novel.