Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens        Audio Book:  12 hours, 12 mins.      Paperback Book:  496 pages            

This book was recommended to me by a friend and I am very glad she told me about it.    I think this would be an excellent selection for a read for a bookclub.   The story is a melancholy one, but, a very good story none the less.   A young woman from well to do means falls for a bad boy who takes her out in the marsh to a broken down house back in the swamp where they have little or nothing to live on and stop popping out babies one after the other.   The former bad boy now bad husband and bad father works sparsely while the mother and kids farm to try to keep some kind of food on the table.   Clothes and shoes aren’t bought till they literally rot off, kids eat or not, but the father comes in drunk quite often and beats everyone up.   One day, the mom just packs a case and goes walking down the lane and never comes back.   The kids, one by one do the same until all that is left is 7 year old Cya and her Dad.   The Dad gets mad cause everybody left and when he is drinking takes it out wholloping Cya but on his sober days, she and he learn to communicate.   In order to survive, Cya has to take on cooking, cleaning etc. and try to make do with the hardscrapple life she is thrust into.   Whenever her Dad gives her a couple of dollars (which isn’t often) she saves it till she has enough to get some grits and maybe another thing or two.   Then she walks into town to the store.    Folks in town take to calling her, “The Marsh Girl.”   They talk bad about her, calling her trash, and saying bad things about her because she lives out in the marshlands past Barkley Cove on the North Carolina coast.    Town people are really down on the people who live outside of town, especially those from the marsh.   They also mistreat black people.    The only people throughout her life that always treated her well was a black man and his wife who traded her clothes and food for smoked fish she would bring to barter.  (The fish were really too small to ever be good for anything but they left her dignity in tact by bartering instead of just donating to her.   The townspeople could care less about her and don’t want her coming in to town so she hardly ever does till she just has to.  Her father finally stops coming home and she is left with no electricity, no toilet and no running water out in the swamp all by herself, just her and the gulls and other marsh birds.   The story goes on from there and is such a good one, you won’t want to put th book down.    It really is a terrific story and I would recommend this book to everyone from Middleschool on up.  

- Shirley J