Hello bookworms! Welcome back to another month and another book. I’m VERY happy that I have finally escaped my book slump, and am now back to a regular reading routine, especially in the nice weather that has occasionally appeared. This book was half read through my break, and half when I had left it, so here are my honest opinions on it.
Where the Crawdads Sing is a book that is partly a murder mystery as well as the description of someone’s life. Kya, the main character, is a girl who is abandoned by her family and left to live by herself in order to survive. When someone dies in the town, due to the prejudices surrounding her, she is blamed for the murder, and we read about the story of her life, her love, the trial, the investigating and other things along the way. The book covers most of Kya’s childhood and young adult years, so we see her grow throughout.
This book was leant to me by my cousin, and I don’t think I would have read it otherwise: it is a little out of my reading comfort zone, but I was prepared to give it a go. The book is all in third person, and changes between times throughout. For example, some chapters would be about Kya as a child, and then you would turn to the next chapter that might be about the Sheriffs trying to work out who killed the man. These are all marked by the dates at the top of the chapter, so sometimes you had to make sure to pay attention to what you were reading and where it fitted into the story. However, I did quite like this as more of both Kya and the situation were revealed, making it an exciting read.
The chapters weren’t too long and provided easy places to stop. Sometimes, they seemed to go on for a while, but I found myself wanting to continue reading straight after the end of the chapter. Most of them were ended on a cliff-hanger or a certain situation, which left me wanting to know what happened next, but had to wait until a few chapters to find out the outcome. I remember having to cover part of a page whilst reading so that I didn’t read the outcome before it had happened.
This book surprised me with the number of genres that it had rolled into one. It had aspects of a romantic novel, a mystery, and also provided a moral story for the reader to remember. The impact of the story mixed with the natural elements shows the importance of not judging person before you have met them and needing to know their story to make the correct decision. The way Kya was treated at some points made me angry, and also highlighted the need for me to make changes in my life.
As always, I would recommend that you read this book. It was a little out of my comfort zone, and isn’t one of my top favourites, but it is still worth a read, especially because of the descriptions and natural elements.
So, there are my opinions on this book! Hope you liked them. Don’t forget if you have a book you want to share with use, you can send them in – I would love to hear about them! Here is a link for more information: https://www.girlguidinglaser.org.uk/challenges/report-for-the-hive.
Happy reading and I’ll see you next month 😊