November - Where The Crawdads Sing

A year ago we put in for a library book club bag for this book. We were all the way up to 4th in line and then Covid hit. And we sat 4th in line for 7 months. Finally, we gave up and read it this month. As of the day we met, we were finally up to 2nd in line. When do you think we might finally have gotten that bag?! 

This was the perfect book to end our serious reading for the year; we all enjoyed it (in fact, most of us loved it) and it gave us a lot to talk about. I had a list of questions but everyone just launched into talking about the book and we talked about it for a half hour before we needed any prompting. As we talk, we hit on a lot of things we agreed required a suspension of disbelief if you wanted to really enjoy the book. I always worry that when we start getting into the weeds talking about the book that it will lessen our enjoyment of the book. Fortunately, that didn't seem to be the case here. 

A heads up to any other book clubs who want to read this book (if there are any left who haven't!) - there's a big reveal way at the end of this book which is impossible not to talk about. We talked a lot about that -  whether or not we had figured it out ahead of time, if it was believable, and a specific piece of evidence. Actually, there were two reveals at the end but one of them was only marginally of interest to most of us except that we wished we had had time to go back through the book to see if it was more relevant than we thought it was. 

We kept going back to the fact that Kya's mother walked away from her two youngest children and left them with an abusive father: how that affected Kya and whether or not it was ever forgivable, why none of Kya's siblings ever came back for her, why not one single white person in the town seemed to have a heart when it came to this poor little girl. 

Whether you end of loving this book or not, we do recommend it for a book club selection. Owens' writes beautifully about the plants, the animals, the birds and the land.