Ann’s Cottage Blog

Author Ann McAllister Clark - muses about books, authors and St. Augustine, Florida

Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens

  Book Review – September 2018

Literary Fiction/Womans Fiction

Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Aug , 2018

One word comes to my mind after reading this book – Wonderful – and all that that word implies. I read the book in two and a half days not because it was a fast read but because it drew me in almost immediately and at the turn of each page I wanted to know more and what would happen next.

Although Where the Crawdads Sing is her first and debut novel, Delia Owens is not at  all new to creating stunning literature having co-authored three non-fiction, best selling, lyrical nature books with her husband Mark Owens when they as wildlife scientists lived in and wrote their memoirs about Africa: Cry of the Kalahari, The Eye of the Elephant, and Secrets of the Savanna.

In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens writes about seven year old Kya abandoned and growing up in the swamps and marshes of coastal North Carolina.    This is the coming-of-age story of a girl living alone moving into womanhood.  She is helped by a few but not many. The book is also a mystery story, a nature expose and a love story.  I learned much about the nature surrounding coastal marshes and isn’t that what we want in our reading, to finish a satisfying story while realizing that the author has subtly taught us something we did not know or had not considered before?  The book is filled to the brim with the meanness of prejudice, sweetness of love, forgiveness and the tenacity of the human spirit.

This really is a story full of wonder and I can easily recommend it.

 

 

 

 

Hurricane Matthew

Well…now I know what it is like to go through a hurricane. It is an adventure I hope I don’t have to go through again. The rain and wind howled and battered up against the house for almost 24 hours. Our little neighborhood of about 100 houses was told by Emergency Services to ‘hunker’ in place because we are 34 feet above sea level. So we didn’t leave. We were surrounded by other neighborhoods with mandatory evacuation orders.   As of a couple of hours ago we have electric – thank you Texas and all the states that sent their power companies to help out the more than 100,000 without power.
We hear from friends who did evacuate that they had to get all the way up into Georgia before they found one room left.

I know that the downtown district of Old St Augustine had at one time two feet of water in the entire area. The city is hundreds of years old with sewer systems patched and repaired over and over – the systems don’t drain well and the city is only about 5-6 feet above sea level. The water 8-9 foot surge from the ocean and the Intracoastal water way along with high tide caused water to flow all the way into town and out to the US1 highway – covering that important highway. We have five or six bridges in the area that were all closed so those that refused to leave had to stay.

Now, at noon we see that we are ok – nothing broken, a yard filled with debris but nothing we can’t handle. We can’t get into St. Aug because the crews want everyone to stay out of their way!

Thanks to all for your concern.