Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens

This is an intriguing murder mystery, woven through the painfully beautiful story of Kya, a young girl abandoned and left to survive on her own in the marshes of North Carolina.

Kya is no stranger to the beautiful but treacherous marshes. Deserted when she was just six years old, eventually “Marsh Girl” learns to survive, thrive and find solace in the beauty of the nature all around her.

Kya, lives in a shack with her dirt-poor family “squeezed together like penned rabbits”: a caring but worn down and helpless mother, a cruel, abusive father and four older siblings. One by one they desert Kya, saving themselves from the frequent, vicious beatings of their father, who is the last to desert her. Her mothers’ leaving is the most heart-breaking and frightening for Kya. “Ma” leaves, letting the door slam with finality behind her. No good-by. Not even a wave to her 6-year-old daughter. Finally, Kya is truly alone, except for the beautiful sea gulls who swoop and dive in to eat the grits she tosses to them each evening.

She becomes a wild child, living completely on her own in the marshes with the seagulls, snow geese, doves and crows as her only companions. She takes herself to school, but stays for just one day because of the cruel mocking from her classmates. So most of what she knows she learned from the creatures with whom she shares the swap. Nature nurtured, tutored, fed and protected her when no one else would.

She grew up navigating the family’s motorboat through the marshes and is able to dock near the small general store where she can buy simple supplies, mostly grits, which she cooks with scrambled eggs, cornbread, biscuits and sometimes beans just like her mother fixed.

Kya grows older and develops into a tall, skinny, tanned teenager with hair as black and “thick as crow wings.” She begins to long for companionship, and thinks “If anyone would understand loneliness the moon would.” She becomes increasingly aware of the older boys she sees in town. And they begin to notice her, especially

Chase Andrews, the handsome only son of wealthy parents. She also becomes good friends with another young man,Tate. Tate loves and becomes protective of her, especially as he sees the questionable attention Chase pays to Kya. Tate tells Kya that his father taught him that “A real man is one who cries without shame, reads poetry with his heart, feels opera in his soul and does what is necessary to defend a woman.” Kya opens herself to Chase and Tate and to a new life.

And then…the story develops into a murder mystery and a very unpredictable ending. As my fellow St. Timothy’s Book Club readers and I discussed this book (which we all loved) – we agreed NOT to discuss the ending until all members had finished the book. It’s that unpredictable and that well done. So I certainly can’t disclose, or even hint at it, to you, Blog readers. I’ll just say it’s definitely worth the wait.

Crawdads is a wonderful, very well-told story with beautiful language and gentle descriptions of nature woven throughout. And there is wonderful poetry that appears, often when least expectedly. You might want to pay attention to it. It’s beautiful, well-written and more important than you might expect.

A word about the author, Delia Owens. She is a wildlife scientist who has coauthored three international best-selling, award-winning nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa. She is much admired and respected for her extensive writing about nature. She holds a BS in Zoology from the University of Georgia and a PhD in Animal Behavior for the University of California at Davis. This is her first fiction book. We hope it is not her last.

About the title “Where the Crawdads Sing”- Kya said her Ma used to encourage her to explore the marsh. “Go as far as you can, way out yonder where the crawdads sing.” Google couldn’t help me learn if crawdads really do sing. But I did learn that they are like small, very tasty lobsters. Maybe it’s better if they don’t sing. Could ruin our appetite for lobsters.

—Gail Stilwill

1984, by George Orwell

Among the influential texts of the 20thcentury, Nineteen Eighty-Fouris an exceptional work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. After political satirist George Orwell watched as the Soviets created an authoritarian state much like Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany,  in 1949 he published his nightmarish vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world in the future, and together with Animal Farm, they have sold more than any two books by any other 20thcentury author.

1984 describes a Dystopia, the antithesis of a Utopia, where Big Brother makes Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini look like sissies. His world is divided into three states, originated from the ashes of World War II: Oceania (the Americas, British Isles, and Australia), Eurasia (the rest of Europe and Russia), and Eastasia (the rest of the world). Continuous war between those three is required to keep the society’s order and peace. WAR IS PEACE

I first read this book when I was in the eighth grade, but I’m not sure why we were required to read it at that age.  I wish I could recall the substance of the discussions by my group of hormonally-challenged teens, but now think that this is a book that is better understood and appreciated long after your first pimple. So, I decided to re-read the book as an adult, hoping I could gain a better appreciation of the classic. Well, it did more than that – it absolutely floored me.  “We shall meet in a place where there is no darkness” sent chills up my spine.

The book is in three parts. The first describes Winston Smith’s predictable life as an unimportant party member.  The second is his life with Julia involving courage, love/lust, and betrayal. And, the final part is about the consequences of those actions, and the methodology of converting political prisoners to embrace Big Brother before disposing of them.  

In the end, Smith is broken, not only physically, but mentally, and after torture of unimaginable dimensions, he completely surrenders, body and soul, to Big Brother. But, in the end, they fix him and he’s happy again – or something — an idea I don’t believe I was able to fully appreciate in middle school.

The brilliance of the novel is Orwell’s prescience of modern life – the ubiquity of television and cameras, the distortion of language, and his ability to construct the possible nightmare and danger of a society without civil liberties and a government with complete control. His idea that truth can be arranged through media (fake news, e.g.) is perhaps the most relevant idea for us today. The part of the  horror of 1984 is that his future is recognizable in 2019, where our President Trump attempts, through manipulation and propaganda, to maintain control simply for satiating his own power hunger. Truly, in this era of “alternative facts’ and an increasing racial intolerance take on society, today’s reality has caught up with 1984.

But, the book is far from perfect. Orwell is a much better theorist than he is a writer. While not a particularly good novel, 1984 is a very good essay, and its ideas are greater than any book. It is bleak, grim, dreary, frightening and upsetting. His characters lack depth, the rhetoric is sometimes didactic, and I believe most writers would have avoided including the lengthy Goldstein treatise, snappily titled “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivisim”, which alters the novel like a scar disfigures a face.

But all that doesn’t matter, because he got it right.  Simply put, 1984 is unquestionably the most memorable and disturbing novel ever. I have always thought that one of the most important qualities of science fiction is that it frees the author to take controversial, politically charged issues, and create a possible future, and in doing so is able to present a compelling and critical argument for change.  With apologies to Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, no one has ever done a better job than Orwell.It was a hard read, but a MUST read. But, remember – Big Brother is watching!!!

— Kenn Johnson

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid

What if our borders weren’t physical? What if migrants could just suddenly show up in your living room or city park or backyard? Or in the church hall? No long lines, no showing papers, just displaced people popping up in your life after their own lives had disintegrated where they were?

In this intriguing book, Mohsin Hamid explores this question and, along the way, demonstrates what it looks like to become a refugee, to have your own world slowly fall apart as you try to live a normal life that becomes less possible every day.   

Two sweethearts, Nadia and Saeed, are young professionals in an unnamed Middle-Eastern country, typical middle-class citizens—she’s in insurance and he’s in marketing and they met at a seminar. But terrorists have taken over the city and it becomes increasingly unsafe. Hamid shows us the day-to-day changes, how the couple’s world gets smaller and smaller as terrorists gain strength. After Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet, the couple decides to leave.

Their unique method of escape is through magical horizontal doors that take people from one country to another. It’s a difficult process—getting access to the doors is mysterious and entails knowing the right people and being able to pay the right fee. Going through them is turbulent and painful, looking a bit like being born, and in a way it is: Those who go through the doors become new people in lands new to them.

The idea for the doors, Hamid said in an interview with the PBS News Hour, was inspired by smart phone screens.

[R]ight now, most of us have a little black rectangle in our pocket or our backpack or our purse. And when we look at it, our consciousness goes far, far away from our bodies, like magically appearing somewhere else, looking at your phone, and suddenly you’re reading about the moon or Mars or Antarctica. And I thought, what would happen if your body could move as easily as your mind can move? I think technology is obliterating geographic distance. And so the doors in a way give life to that. 

 Hamid considers himself a lifelong migrant—from Pakistan to California, then back, then to London and back. He knows the migrant experience can be terrifying and, at times, deadly, because we do not focus on the fact that people who want to enter our countries are just that: people. But when migrants literally show up on our doorsteps we have to stop dealing with them as abstractions, as legal arguments and look them in the eye instead. Again, talking to the News Hour he says:

[W]e have become so focused on the story of how somebody crosses the border, how did you cross the Mediterranean in a small boat, or how did you cross the U.S.-Mexico border, crawl underneath the barbed wire? And we think that people who have done that are different from us. It makes us imagine that that’s all their life consisted of, and that’s very different from us.  

But once you take away that part of their story, you’re left with people who are just like us, actually, that any of us can have this experience. And so hopefully taking away that part of the story doesn’t minimize the importance in the real world that that happens, but reminds us that that is not what makes these people who they are. They are people just like us. 

Hamid also shows that we are all migrants in one way or another. In one of the many vignettes that pop up throughout the book he introduces us to a woman who has stayed in the San Francisco area her entire life, while the world has radically changed around her. His conclusion:

“We are all migrants through time.”  

Nadia and Saeed migrate through time and through space, facing anti-migrant attitudes in the Greek Island of Mykonos, London, and Marin County, California. Ultimately, the refugees are accepted, if not always welcomed, sometimes after riots, usually after chaos. Eventually the different cultures learn to live alongside one another, creating a new culture, which is a mash of the old. The initial acceptance comes, as usual, through foods.  

The book is not for those who want a literal and linear progression of plot and a clear sense of time and place. Hamid’s writing style can take a while to get accustomed to—most paragraphs are one sentence long, and the sentences can be a bit rambling. Yet this style matches the storytelling sense of the book and makes it more real. And the doors are shown before they are actually explained, so there are a few moments early in the book when the reader is not entirely sure what is going on. And the vignettes of unrelated people can be confusing.   

Hamid creates characters whose struggle is believable, relatable, and scary as hell. Every person who says migrants should go back to where they came from should have to read this book.

— Pat Prijatel