Book Review: Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A lovely read, marred by the impossibility of it all and by the overwrought construction with flashbacks and flashforwards. It seemed to be working a bit too hard; in plot and prose and dialogue.

But, even so, lovely. Once in a while, Owens hits the sweet spot and the reader feels like Kya when she is just learning to read; "I wadn't aware words could hold so much. I didn't know a sentence could be so full."

But other times, Owens overwrites. By a long shot.

Nevertheless, she got closer than anyone else I've ever read in allowing me to understand Einstein. I mean, I still don't understand it, but her explanation is the closest I've ever come;
"...time is no more fixed than the stars. Time speeds and bends around planets and suns, is different in the mountains than in the valleys, and is part of the same fabric as space, which curves and swells as does the sea. Objects, whether planets or apples, fall or orbit, not because of a gravitational energy, but because they plummet into the silky folds of spacetime--like into the ripples on a pond--created by those of higher mass...Unfortunately, gravity holds no sway on human thought, and the high school text still taught that apples fall to the ground because of a powerful force from the Earth."

And when Kya is trying to muddle through her mother leaving; "...you told me that a she-fox will sometimes leave her kits if she's starving or under some other extreme stress. The kits die--as they probably would have anyway--but the vixen lives to breed again when conditions are better, when she can raise a new litter to maturity. In nature--out yonder where the crawdads sing--these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother's number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in what ever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn't be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive--way back yonder."

But there's the rub. All this is being said in conversation by a kid who grew up without parents or formal education. A little unlikely as dialogue, but fascinating nonetheless.

"The language of the court was, of course, not as poetic as the language of the marsh. Yet Kya saw similarities in their natures. The judge, obviously the alpha male, was secure in his position, so his posture was imposing, but relaxed and unthreatened as the territorial boar. Tom Milton, too, exuded confidence and rank with easy movements and stance. A powerful buck, acknowledged as such. The prosecutor, on the other hand, relied on wide, bright ties and broad-shouldered suit jackets to enhance his status. He threw his weight by flinging his arms or raising his voice. A lesser male needs to shout to be noticed. The bailiff represented the lowest-ranking male and depended on his belt hung with glistening pistol, clanging wad of keys, and clunky radio to bolster his position."


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