June 14, 2019
Wow.
Like so many people, I read this book because my book club chose it. Unlike so many people, I am not impressed. Not even a little bit. A lot of times when a book is rated this high, I tend to think it's me and not the book. But nope. This time I fully believe it's the book.
This will be ranty and in the order in which things made me want to rant. No apologies.
I should've known things weren't going to go well from the title alone. Crayfish are all over the place, but they don't sing in any of those places.*
I definitely knew this wasn't the book for me on the very first page. I absolutely abhor overwrought prose that reads like the author sat down with the intention of writing the next Great American Novel and therefore had a certain number of adjectives and metaphors to fit on each page to prove their work was worth the accolades it was sure to get with sentences like:
"Swamp water is still and dark, having swallowed the light inits muddy throat. Even night crawlers are diurnal in this lair. There are sounds, of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life."
There is beautiful imagery, and then there is pretentious cobbling together of SAT words and figurative language so it seems deep but really isn't. For me, this was the latter. And so much of the book is just that overly flowery language barfed over every page for no reason, saying nothing or not making a lick of sense with what it does say. But it sounds pretty! So! Art!
Then there was the massive eye-brow raising I did when I discovered this was taking place in North Carolina. The dialect. AGHHHHH!!!! This is why authors shouldn't use dialect when they write. You have to know a place so well in order to do that. Southern hick does not equal southern hick does not equal southern hick. There are (at the very least) five different dialects spoken in North Carolina. I attended Appalachian State University in Boone. The majority of my professors could tell which region each NC native was from by a couple sentences. I had a few who could get within two counties of where they were born after hearing them speak. Yeah. Kya's father's dialect would be exceedingly different from everyone else in their community as he is from the mountains and they are in the Outer Banks. Those are so distinctive and nothing alike. No one else in the world speaks like the Pamlico Sound people of NC. And it is rather hard to capture its cadence and brogue on page so just don't try. You will fail. (Owens totally failed.)
Is that nit-picky? Maybe. But I'm more concerned with how the dialect was used. Every "good" person in the book overcame their dialect to learn to speak "proper" (ugh I hate even typing that word) English. Are you telling me Kya, who didn't have TV or radio as influence, lost her dialect with no practice and no outside influence because she was just...smart??? Good???? Same with Tate. But Chase kept his so we knew he was bad and a threat. There's some classist nonsense imbedded deep in that, and I am not here for it in any way. It's particularly annoying as it reads the way I imagine people pretend to speak when they're speaking "southern hick" to be mockingly superior but have never actually heard a real human in the south speak.**
Then I reached the part on p57 where Kya's dad says of his family:
"They had land, rich land, raised tobacco and cotton and such. Over near Asheville. Yo' gramma on my side wore bonnets big as wagon wheels and long skirts. We lived in a house wif a verandder that went a'the way around two stories high. It was fine, mighty fine."
I actually took a screenshot and sent it to my husband who was born and lived his entire life "near Asheville". His response, "What in the world?" What in the world indeed.
A. No one from western NC talks like this. And Kya's father didn't move to the OBX until he was an adult, so he would still have his home dialect. Any student of language knows you don't shed and switch an accent easily once you're in adulthood. It takes practice. And even then the results are dodgy. Also this is not how Pamlico people speak anyway. See my rant about dialect above.
B. Does Owens know Asheville is in the mountains??? (Tobacco was grown in the mountains though not nearly as much or as successfully as in the Piedmont. Cotton is waaaayyy harder. It gets too cold and rains too much. Also there's just not enough flat, arable land to make it worth the effort. I know there was a cotton mill in Asheville at the time, but I've never heard about people growing the cotton around there. If they were, it had to have failed more than half the time and not because of weevils. It's just not hot enough long enough. And no one was getting rich off agriculture and building plantation style houses there with slaves as was mentioned later in the book. Western NC was not like the Deep South. Because it is MOUNTAINS. Anyone who has ever driven to Asheville from the Piedmont knows exactly how mountainous. It's like flat flat flat whoa we're going UP. There's not enough flat land for plantations.)
Then there was the part where Tate's mom went to ASHEVILLE for a bike because they didn't have it at the local store. Like WHAT??? She didn't try Wilmington? She drove past Greenville, Raleigh (the capitol), Durham, Chapel Hill, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, missed exits to CHARLOTTE (the largest city), to drive up a mountain for a bike? Literally no other city in NC had it? it takes SIX HOURS to drive from the Pamlico Sound to Asheville on a good traffic day in the year of our Lord 2019. Do you know how long it would've been in the 50s???
Good Grief, what is this woman's obsession with Asheville? And does she believe it is somewhere near the coast rather than on the complete opposite end of a rather long state?
Which is how I knew no matter how smart she sounded or how much she might know about science and wildlife, Delia Owens didn't bother to research squat about North Carolina. Or she did and then disregarded it for whatever reason. Maybe she thought the Outer Banks and Asheville as NC's top tourist destinations were the names she needed to drop to make her book sound authentic??? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Huge parts of the novel are a giant snooze fest of nature this nature that and here's some more nature. And also grits. Because this is SOUTHERN y'all. In case it hasn't been hammered in yet.
There were some freakin' awkward sexual scenes.
Then there were the long drawn out court scenes that were just so tedious.
I gathered from these scenes Owens is also unclear about travel times from the Greenville to the OBX. (Also I’m not sure if there ever was a Piedmont Hotel in Greenville, which is in the coastal plain and not the Piedmont. However, there IS one in Waynesville, which is also not in the Piedmont. Waynesville is in the mountains near.....guess where....Asheville.) Someone buy the woman a freakin’ map since she clearly doesn’t know what Google is.
The working of the town vs Kya also bothered me. It's like Owens knows that the OBX people are a difficult community to become a part of without truly understanding the whys and hows of it all.
Kya's character development was just so frustrating overall. And some of the stuff she accomplishes requires a tremendous suspension of disbelief. Owens definitely wanted the reader to see her a certain way. She is a manic pixie dream girl in a marsh until suddenly she isn't...
And finally rant-wise, Owens doesn't seem to know quite what she wants this book to be. Is it an ode to nature? Is it a crime novel? Is it literary fiction? It's kind of like she wanted to write the crime novel but genre writing is too plebeian, so here comes the overwrought language and navel gazing. Because ART. The nature part was her falling back on what she was comfortable with I think.
*Crayfish do, I learned from my research, make a noise but we don't often hear it as they can make it underwater as well as out of water. It sounds like tap dancing. No singing even remotely flirted with. Where the Crawdads Tap Dance doesn't have the same ring I guess. And also doesn't narrow things down geographically. I did wonder why it wasn't called Where the Cicadas Sing. Because those sing. And are on a 17 year cycle. Which would have fit PERFECTLY with the timeline of the book. So color me confused. I know NC can be overrun with cicadas, but I'm not sure if the Pamlico region has them or not. Still would have made more sense than the actual title. (Again, it sounds flowery and important. Doesn't mean it has depth or meaning.)
**My husband decided at age 13 to get rid of his accent. He worked long and hard at it. He did it by listening to network TV anchors and copying their speech patterns. It took years of concentrated effort. It's still not completely gone though he can pass for not being southern in other parts of the country. And when he's home? It comes back full force with all its dialectic eccentricities. I've lived the majority of my life in the Southern Appalachian mountains. Everyone here still knows I'm an outsider the second I open my mouth despite the fact my midwestern relatives swear up and down I have an accent now. And people here in eastern Tennessee are uncertain about my husband because he sounds kind of like them but not quite. (He's let his accent come back more since settling here because it helps with the not being considered an outsider. That's as important in southern Appalachia as it is in the OBX if you want to be embraced by the community.) But a single gorge changed the dialect between eastern TN Appalachian and western NC Appalachian just enough natives here recognize his accent as being not quite theirs. BY THE WAY my husband was just as smart after training out his accent as he was when he had it at its thickest. He knew he needed it gone to be a journalist, so he got rid of it. He was literally asked to "speak southern" by people in Michigan when we lived there briefly more than once so they could laugh about it. Which is f***ed up. Southerners speak the way they do for cultural and geographical reasons and it has nothing to do with the amount of intelligence or righteousness they have.
Like so many people, I read this book because my book club chose it. Unlike so many people, I am not impressed. Not even a little bit. A lot of times when a book is rated this high, I tend to think it's me and not the book. But nope. This time I fully believe it's the book.
This will be ranty and in the order in which things made me want to rant. No apologies.
I should've known things weren't going to go well from the title alone. Crayfish are all over the place, but they don't sing in any of those places.*
I definitely knew this wasn't the book for me on the very first page. I absolutely abhor overwrought prose that reads like the author sat down with the intention of writing the next Great American Novel and therefore had a certain number of adjectives and metaphors to fit on each page to prove their work was worth the accolades it was sure to get with sentences like:
"Swamp water is still and dark, having swallowed the light inits muddy throat. Even night crawlers are diurnal in this lair. There are sounds, of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life."
There is beautiful imagery, and then there is pretentious cobbling together of SAT words and figurative language so it seems deep but really isn't. For me, this was the latter. And so much of the book is just that overly flowery language barfed over every page for no reason, saying nothing or not making a lick of sense with what it does say. But it sounds pretty! So! Art!
Then there was the massive eye-brow raising I did when I discovered this was taking place in North Carolina. The dialect. AGHHHHH!!!! This is why authors shouldn't use dialect when they write. You have to know a place so well in order to do that. Southern hick does not equal southern hick does not equal southern hick. There are (at the very least) five different dialects spoken in North Carolina. I attended Appalachian State University in Boone. The majority of my professors could tell which region each NC native was from by a couple sentences. I had a few who could get within two counties of where they were born after hearing them speak. Yeah. Kya's father's dialect would be exceedingly different from everyone else in their community as he is from the mountains and they are in the Outer Banks. Those are so distinctive and nothing alike. No one else in the world speaks like the Pamlico Sound people of NC. And it is rather hard to capture its cadence and brogue on page so just don't try. You will fail. (Owens totally failed.)
Is that nit-picky? Maybe. But I'm more concerned with how the dialect was used. Every "good" person in the book overcame their dialect to learn to speak "proper" (ugh I hate even typing that word) English. Are you telling me Kya, who didn't have TV or radio as influence, lost her dialect with no practice and no outside influence because she was just...smart??? Good???? Same with Tate. But Chase kept his so we knew he was bad and a threat. There's some classist nonsense imbedded deep in that, and I am not here for it in any way. It's particularly annoying as it reads the way I imagine people pretend to speak when they're speaking "southern hick" to be mockingly superior but have never actually heard a real human in the south speak.**
Then I reached the part on p57 where Kya's dad says of his family:
"They had land, rich land, raised tobacco and cotton and such. Over near Asheville. Yo' gramma on my side wore bonnets big as wagon wheels and long skirts. We lived in a house wif a verandder that went a'the way around two stories high. It was fine, mighty fine."
I actually took a screenshot and sent it to my husband who was born and lived his entire life "near Asheville". His response, "What in the world?" What in the world indeed.
A. No one from western NC talks like this. And Kya's father didn't move to the OBX until he was an adult, so he would still have his home dialect. Any student of language knows you don't shed and switch an accent easily once you're in adulthood. It takes practice. And even then the results are dodgy. Also this is not how Pamlico people speak anyway. See my rant about dialect above.
B. Does Owens know Asheville is in the mountains??? (Tobacco was grown in the mountains though not nearly as much or as successfully as in the Piedmont. Cotton is waaaayyy harder. It gets too cold and rains too much. Also there's just not enough flat, arable land to make it worth the effort. I know there was a cotton mill in Asheville at the time, but I've never heard about people growing the cotton around there. If they were, it had to have failed more than half the time and not because of weevils. It's just not hot enough long enough. And no one was getting rich off agriculture and building plantation style houses there with slaves as was mentioned later in the book. Western NC was not like the Deep South. Because it is MOUNTAINS. Anyone who has ever driven to Asheville from the Piedmont knows exactly how mountainous. It's like flat flat flat whoa we're going UP. There's not enough flat land for plantations.)
Then there was the part where Tate's mom went to ASHEVILLE for a bike because they didn't have it at the local store. Like WHAT??? She didn't try Wilmington? She drove past Greenville, Raleigh (the capitol), Durham, Chapel Hill, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, missed exits to CHARLOTTE (the largest city), to drive up a mountain for a bike? Literally no other city in NC had it? it takes SIX HOURS to drive from the Pamlico Sound to Asheville on a good traffic day in the year of our Lord 2019. Do you know how long it would've been in the 50s???
Good Grief, what is this woman's obsession with Asheville? And does she believe it is somewhere near the coast rather than on the complete opposite end of a rather long state?
Which is how I knew no matter how smart she sounded or how much she might know about science and wildlife, Delia Owens didn't bother to research squat about North Carolina. Or she did and then disregarded it for whatever reason. Maybe she thought the Outer Banks and Asheville as NC's top tourist destinations were the names she needed to drop to make her book sound authentic??? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Huge parts of the novel are a giant snooze fest of nature this nature that and here's some more nature. And also grits. Because this is SOUTHERN y'all. In case it hasn't been hammered in yet.
There were some freakin' awkward sexual scenes.
Then there were the long drawn out court scenes that were just so tedious.
I gathered from these scenes Owens is also unclear about travel times from the Greenville to the OBX. (Also I’m not sure if there ever was a Piedmont Hotel in Greenville, which is in the coastal plain and not the Piedmont. However, there IS one in Waynesville, which is also not in the Piedmont. Waynesville is in the mountains near.....guess where....Asheville.) Someone buy the woman a freakin’ map since she clearly doesn’t know what Google is.
The working of the town vs Kya also bothered me. It's like Owens knows that the OBX people are a difficult community to become a part of without truly understanding the whys and hows of it all.
Kya's character development was just so frustrating overall. And some of the stuff she accomplishes requires a tremendous suspension of disbelief. Owens definitely wanted the reader to see her a certain way. She is a manic pixie dream girl in a marsh until suddenly she isn't...
And finally rant-wise, Owens doesn't seem to know quite what she wants this book to be. Is it an ode to nature? Is it a crime novel? Is it literary fiction? It's kind of like she wanted to write the crime novel but genre writing is too plebeian, so here comes the overwrought language and navel gazing. Because ART. The nature part was her falling back on what she was comfortable with I think.
*Crayfish do, I learned from my research, make a noise but we don't often hear it as they can make it underwater as well as out of water. It sounds like tap dancing. No singing even remotely flirted with. Where the Crawdads Tap Dance doesn't have the same ring I guess. And also doesn't narrow things down geographically. I did wonder why it wasn't called Where the Cicadas Sing. Because those sing. And are on a 17 year cycle. Which would have fit PERFECTLY with the timeline of the book. So color me confused. I know NC can be overrun with cicadas, but I'm not sure if the Pamlico region has them or not. Still would have made more sense than the actual title. (Again, it sounds flowery and important. Doesn't mean it has depth or meaning.)
**My husband decided at age 13 to get rid of his accent. He worked long and hard at it. He did it by listening to network TV anchors and copying their speech patterns. It took years of concentrated effort. It's still not completely gone though he can pass for not being southern in other parts of the country. And when he's home? It comes back full force with all its dialectic eccentricities. I've lived the majority of my life in the Southern Appalachian mountains. Everyone here still knows I'm an outsider the second I open my mouth despite the fact my midwestern relatives swear up and down I have an accent now. And people here in eastern Tennessee are uncertain about my husband because he sounds kind of like them but not quite. (He's let his accent come back more since settling here because it helps with the not being considered an outsider. That's as important in southern Appalachia as it is in the OBX if you want to be embraced by the community.) But a single gorge changed the dialect between eastern TN Appalachian and western NC Appalachian just enough natives here recognize his accent as being not quite theirs. BY THE WAY my husband was just as smart after training out his accent as he was when he had it at its thickest. He knew he needed it gone to be a journalist, so he got rid of it. He was literally asked to "speak southern" by people in Michigan when we lived there briefly more than once so they could laugh about it. Which is f***ed up. Southerners speak the way they do for cultural and geographical reasons and it has nothing to do with the amount of intelligence or righteousness they have.
