Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens****

Reading dates: 16 July – 1 August 2021

I read Delia Owens’ bestseller while on the first session of my annual retreat with Kia in the Spanish mountains, the time I was a student and on holiday. It took me a while to get to like this book even if on the surface it looked like the perfect holiday read. I could not work out what the book was about for a long time. But when I did, it was good.

Part of the problem was perhaps the chronology, with the narration going back and forth in time. There was a map at the beginning of the book, so we could understand the Marsh, but perhaps a timeline would have helped a bit in the first part of the novel. In the end, I disregarded the years at the beginning of chapters and put the sequence together myself.

In the second half, the story, the characters and the setting, as well as the telling, began to fit for me and the best was a well recounted and gripping court case. The ending I found beautiful, worth it. And only on those two things in gets 4 stars. For me though, overall, it was a bit middle of the road.

Some lovely passages I highlighted:

A great blue heron is the color of gray mist reflecting in blue water.

Kya knew it wasn’t so much that the herd would be incomplete without one of its deer, but that each deer would be incomplete without her herd.