Book Review : where the crawdads sing

 Where The Crawdads Sing 

Delia Owens 

Published -2018

Pages- 368 

Any cataract surgery convalescent is a contemplative ruminant !  Forced to shed spectacles and ‘Don’ dark sunglasses reading becomes an insufferable agony best avoided. He bides his time  wallowing in self-pity ruing loss of reading time or riffling through reads of the recent past. That’s how  the day found me flipping through this bestseller again.

A highly  acclaimed , phenomenally successful  debut novel that outsold more renowned  contemporary novelists including King and Atwood. 

The storyline is hauntingly poignant and heart wrenching. A wretched preteen girl is abandoned by her own in the middle of nowhere , grows up scrounging for food, battling loneliness, overcoming elemental fears of the wilderness, dodging stalking sexual predators, going through the rites of passage for  coming of age- emotional turmoil, to  finally acquire worldly recognition and live life on her terms and in her chosen surroundings – the swamp that nourished, protected, and finally won her acceptability into civilized society. The girl whose life is a scroll of rejection has the last laugh. 

What really worked for its runaway success and to inveigle its way into my subconsciousness ? Not the book title for one thing. Crawdads do not sing, merely send out trains of grating  ‘cric-cric’ sound pulses. It’s the narrative's elegance and felicity evoking a wide range of moods that enamoured me.  

Four elements  touched a very sympathetic chord . 

First, for a landlubber littoral and maritime settings hold an indefinable draw. In the wilderness of an untouched swampy marshland dotted with cattail green lagoons and girdling a strip of virgin coastline the author arrestingly captures the rhythm and tempo of nature's music in all its spellbinding richness - ‘the ocean sang bass, the gulls sang soprano’ ; ‘minnows darted between sunspots and shadows above the roar of pounding waves’; gull song drifting through the trees from the sea.

Second, Owen’s compelling portraiture of a cruelly wronged ‘marsh girl’, victim of parental delinquency , her desolation, longing for true love, companionship and social acceptance is extremely powerful and heart-rending. It elicited  overwhelming sympathy for her. 

Third, all of us like victims to turn the tables. She does. And gets love, life requite and stature. 

Lastly, nothing gets the heart racing like a courtroom melodrama of fortunes swinging back and forth for the accused in a murder mystery. Dalia Owens quintessentially concocts suspenseful twists and turns in both crime investigation and prosecution.

Introspectively , I think it is these pegs of the plot that forced its instant  recall in my idling hours. A rare,  moving, and emotionally unsettling  story of triumph over gloom, despair, desolation, and love.

Delia Owens leaves us with a soul stirring thought about Kyl :

Did we exclude her because she was different or was she different because we excluded her ?

Book Review : The woman in the Window

The Woman in the Window 

A J Finn 

Published -2018

Pages- 427

A mystery thriller that won’t send your heart racing but one that you will race to finish, not precisely  ‘unputdownable’ but one you will not like to put down. 

In a road accident Dr (Mrs) Ann Fox suffers a severe spinal injury, and is confined to her bungalow in an upper-end neighbourhood in Harlem . The trauma also leaves her with a psychological condition – agoraphobia, a range of anxiety disorders that manifests ,inter alia, in fear of stepping out of home. Bina ,the physiotherapist, weekly visits her for physio sessions, and Dr Fielding, psychologist, administers online consultation to control her agoraphobia. In the basement  lives the tenant, David who is mostly out doing odd jobs. 

She lives alone and whiles time pouring large libations of wine to herself, watching Hitchcockian suspense and mystery movies, offering free online consultancy to psychologically traumatized patients, and ,most importantly for the storyline, espying on neighbours.

From the window of her study Ann espies Jane Russell, wife of Alistair, mother of Ethan, bleeding  with a silver handle embedded in her chest in the living room of house no 207 across the park. She calls the cops. They don’t believe her story. The anti-depressant drugs she was taking has hallucinogenic side effects hence her testimony is not to be relied upon.  And the story takes off with riveting twists and turns between what is real and what imagined. 

The book manages to keep the reader hooked. It has all the ingredients that go into creating the surround of suspense heightened by flawed characters and doling out of clues in driblets. However, at many points I was seized by a sense of déjà vu. Hadn’t I read something similar somewhere and the plot begins to look increasingly like a new filigree woven from familiar episodic strands.  

All in all, a thriller that straddles the line between ‘well’ and ‘swell’, yet  indubitably an engrossing and enjoyable read.