Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

If I had been set a challenge to put together a stack of books under the hashtag 'Books that make you go Hrmm', then this one would certainly be in the stack. I would probably also throw on a few of Alice Hoffman's Magic series and anything I could find with the phrase 'the hundred year old who....' in the title.

The definition of an Hrmm book is anything that could have rung the bell at the fair but somehow didn't hit the target hard enough.

This story is about a young woman called Kya who was abandoned to live alone in a run-down shack hidden away in the marshlands of Carolina some time in the 1960s. First her mother walked out because she could no longer live with her drunken and abusive husband, then Kya's siblings drifted away and finally her father disappeared without trace. Kya is not even in her teens at this point but she manages to find ways to feed herself and generate an income that will allow her to continue to live out of the reach of people in authority. Although the premise is unlikely, I think I could have accepted it more if Kya grew up to be an eccentric with hair like wild straw and tic bites all over her legs, but what we end up with is a Disney princess with beautiful olive skin and long flowing locks.

Two young men compete for her affections, and naturally they are both handsome healthy specimens, and by the time Kya reaches an age to go on dates we find her packing picnic baskets and making caramel cake. Over the course of a decade she has morphed from a neglected child into a rare beauty whose only eccentricity is to be cleverer than you would expect and capable of creating intricate paintings of wildlife. I wanted her to be a lot stranger than she was and that could have provided more depth to her personality.

Running alongside Kya's story is a murder mystery and the local sheriff's handling of that caused me to Hrmm more times than was strictly necessary. I just hope Delia Owens is not looking forward to a career in crime writing because by the time the case got to the trial we were almost back in Disney cartoon territory and the court scenes carried very little weight.

Not the best book I've read this summer.

Comments

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