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Bibliothèque | Type de matériel | Numéro de cote topographique | Statut |
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Recherche en cours... Englewood | Audiobooks | FIC OWENS CD | Recherche en cours... Inconnu |
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#1 New York Times Bestseller
More than 4 million copies sold
A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club Pick
"I can't even express how much I love this book I didn't want this story to end "--Reese Witherspoon
"Painfully beautiful."-- The New York Times Book Review
"Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver."-- Bustle
For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life--until the unthinkable happens.
Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Karen Russell, Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
Critiques (3)
Critique du Guardian
This lush debut about an isolated girl who finds education and solace in nature is already a US bestseller In screen dramas, during a scene of sex or violence in a living room, the camera will often slyly reveal that a David Attenborough wildlife documentary is playing unwatched in the corner. The naturalist's whispered observations about the tactics of the "male" or "female" comment ironically or ominously on the human interactions. That trope is spectacularly extended in Where the Crawdads Sing, the debut novel by Delia Owens, an American wildlife scientist. It lands in Britain boosted by the cherished trinity of New York Times bestsellerdom, a frenzied foreign sales fight, and a film in development by Reese Witherspoon (her online book club picked the novel in September 2018). The main storyline spans - in a date-jumbling, tension-building order -1952 to 1970, following Kya Clark between the ages of six and 25 as she grows up alone in a shack in the swamplands of North Carolina after being abandoned by her family. She learns from the wildlife around her, gaining tricks of camouflage to evade truant officers and acquiring hunting skills to feed herself and catch mussels and fish to sell to shopkeepers in the town beyond the creek. As a human who knows only nature, all Kya's reference points come from her surroundings - and her creator's day job. Her observation that mother animals and birds always return to their young leads her poignantly to believe that her childhood solitude will be temporary. When, as a teenager, she starts to attract attention from two townie boys, kind working-class Tate and arrogant posh boy Chase, her dating rituals are drawn from observing the sex life of fireflies. She also, crucially, observes the dangers of predation in the wild. Among the many modern phenomena of which isolated Kya has no inkling is the vast popularity of crime fiction. But Owens knows the tricks of the genre, beginning the novel with a prologue set in 1969 in which a young man has died suspiciously in the swamp. The rest of the book cuts between the investigation, in which bigoted witnesses incriminate the "swamp girl", and flashbacks to Kya's youth and young adulthood, as local suspicion grows that makes the white people dislike her almost as much as they do the residents of the area known, in the prejudiced term of the time, as Colored Town. Appreciating the fictional limitations of a feral recluse with no vocabulary or life skills, Owens provides tutors for Kya. As a result, the tone of the central section sometimes feels like YA, as Kya is instructed by a wise African American woman (one of the supporting characters who flirt with virtuous cliche) in the mysteries of men and menstruation. Somewhere in stage schools now are the actors who, playing the young and older Kya, should have a shot at Oscars But soon the narrative is satisfyingly reclaimed for older adults when at the local library Kya reads an article entitled "Sneaky Fuckers" in a science journal, which describes deceitful mating strategies. These include undersized bullfrogs who hang out with the alpha males with a view to picking up spare females, and the male damselfly, to whom God or Darwin has given a useful scoop that removes the sperm of a prior impregnator to clear the passage for his own. As with those Attenborough clips in screen fiction, these anecdotes hover as metaphors for the behaviour of males in the story, and will allow the director of the eventual film to have fun with pointed cutaways. The divided timeline - a standard cinematic structure - will also help the screenwriter. And somewhere in stage schools now are the actors who, playing the young and older Kya, should have a shot at Oscars. She is a vivid and original character. At times, her survival in isolation comes close to superheroism, but Owens convincingly depicts the instincts and calculations that get Kya into and out of difficulties. Without too much sentimentality, there is a strong emotional line in her desire to have a "shred of family". The potential soppiness of a coming-of-age romance is also offset by the possibility that Kya is a murderer, although Owens has studied the big beasts of crime fiction sufficiently to leave room for doubt and surprises. The storylines involving social competition and violent death feel like a reworking, from a young female perspective, of Theodore Dreiser's classic 1925 melodrama An American Tragedy. Like Dreiser, Owens combines high tension with precise detail about how people dress, sound, live and eat - the case studies in her book are both human and natural. Surprise bestsellers are often works that chime with the times. Though set in the 1950s and 60s, Where the Crawdads Sing is, in its treatment of racial and social division and the fragile complex-ities of nature, obviously relevant to contemporary politics and ecology. But these themes will reach a huge audience though the writer's old-fashioned talents for compelling character, plotting and landscape description. - Mark Lawson
Critique du New York Review of Books
HO-HO-??, kiddies. Here comes Bad Santa with another gift sack filled with mysteries, crime stories and body parts. Ugh, what's that gooey red stuff dripping out of Santa's bag? Not to worry, just some melted candy canes. Now, on to this year's rundown of the best Good Books for Bad Grown-Ups. MOST ORIGINAL MURDER method: For lashing a guy to his wheelchair, sealing his mouth with superglue and tossing him into a river, a Christmas angel goes to Ken Bruen's IN THE GALWAY SILENCE (Mysterious Press, $26). Better double the angels, though, because there are two victims - twins, no less. SOFTEST HARD-BOILED PRIVATE EYE: That would be Isaiah (IQ) Quintabe, Joe Ide's brainy P.I. from Los Angeles, who is paid for his services in casseroles, cookies and reindeer sweaters. In WRECKED (Mulholland, $27), the detective accepts a painting from a beautiful client who hires him to find her mother. But this modest missingpersons case leads to a vengeance drama involving an electric cattle prod with enough volts "to knock a steer sideways." MOST UNPRINTABLE DIALOGUE: Lots of competition here, but the angel goes to John Sandford's madly entertaining Virgil Flowers mystery HOLY GHOST (Putnam, $29). Virgil, an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, brings a wry sense of humor to the miraculous when the Blessed Virgin pays a visit to a church in Wheatfield, making a bundle of dough for the tiny town. CREEPIEST SETTING: No contest! Anne Perry wins that one with her latest Victorian mystery, DARK TIDE RISING (Ballantine, $28). William Monk, commander of the Thames River Police, takes us to Jacob's Island, a place "like death," where rotting houses are slowly sinking into a "thick, viscous mud that sucked anything of weight into itself, like quicksand." MOST CUTTING WIT: Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski walks away with this angel. In SHELL GAME (Morrow, $27.99), the Chicago P.I. slips into an office after hours by posing as a maid, reasoning that "anyone who's cleaning up after you is part of your furniture, not a person." Needing a foreign language to hide behind, she improvises with the lyrics to "Vissi d'arte." TOUGHEST PUZZLE: I dare you to match wits with Keigo Higashino. Giles Murray's translation of NEWCOMER (Minotaur, $27.99) presents Higashino's fabled Tokyo Metropolitan Police detective, Kyoichiro Kaga (he of the "razor-sharp mind and bloodhound nature"), with a series of minor enigmas wrapped around a brainbusting central mystery: Who murdered a woman with no enemies? PRETTIEST LANGUAGE: That makes two angels for Ken Bruen, whose Irish roughneck, Jack Taylor, talks like an angel himself - only dirtier. IN THE GALWAY SILENCE (Mysterious Press, $26) gives this hotheaded detective good cause for rage, being a fictional treatment of, among other things, a notorious case of systemic fetal death and infanticide in Irish convents. BEST MILEAGE FROM A ROLLING STONE: There's no moss on Jack Reacher. In PAST TENSE (Delacorte, $28.99), Lee Child's peripatetic hero wanders with a purpose, all the way to his father's birthplace in Laconia, N.H. Reacher's search for his roots in this sad old mill town ("a horrific tableau of clouds of smoke and raging fires") is surprisingly sentimental, but brace yourself for the subplot. BEST CHARACTERS OUT OF THEIR DEPTH: What better definition of George Pelecanos's great guys, so human and so doomed? In the man who came uptown (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $27), Michael Hudson emerges from prison a bona fide bibliophile, thanks to the librarian who turned him away from crime and onto books. But this can't last when bad friends realize they need a good guy to drive a getaway car. BEST NATURE STUDY, RED IN TOOTH & CLAW: Delia Owens speaks softly in WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (Putnam, $26), a tenderly told first novel that begins in 1969, when two boys on bikes come upon a body half submerged in a swamp. The rest of the story reveals how the corpse got there and why we might wish it had never been found. MOST COLORFUL CHARACTER NAMESJames Lee Burke is rightly admired for his lush Louisiana bayou crimescapes. But ROBICHEAUX (Simon & Schuster, $27.99) reminds us of his talent for naming locals like Baby Cakes Babineau and Pookie the Possum Domingue, along with a contract killer called Chester Wimple. ("Sometimes people call me Smiley.") LOUDEST BANG FOR THE BUCK: Half the members of the Los Angeles Police Department's bomb squad are blown to smithereens in Thomas Perry's THE BOMB MAKER (Mysterious Press, $26). "Bombs were acts of murder," Perry allows, but "they were also jokes on you, riddles the bomber hoped were too tough for you." WEEPIEST WEEPER: Wounded World War I veterans and grieving widows make up much of the shrunken population of the town of Wolfpit, encountered by Inspector Ian Rutledge in THE GATEKEEPER (Morrow, $26.99). Charles Todd's hero, himself a victim of shell shock, is one of the moodiest detectives in the genre. COOLEST DEBUT: By their taste in music shall ye know them. Joe King Oliver, a New York private eye who makes his debut in Walter Mosley's new crime novel, DOWN THE RIVER UNTO THE SEA (Mulholland/ Little, Brown, $27), went into prison with a love of classic jazz masters like Fats Waller. He emerged with a taste for the tormented sounds of Thelonious Monk. MOST SIMPÁTICO DETECTIVE: Donna Leon's Venetian policeman, Commissario Guido Brunetti, bares his bleeding heart in THE TEMPTATION OF FORGIVENESS (Atlantic Monthly, $26) when he aids a woman whose 15-year-old son is taking drugs. He advises her to cook dinner for her children, "to show them you're all right and life is normal." CRUELEST MURDERER: Jeffery Deaver indulges his singular flair for ghastly irony in THE CUTTING EDGE (Grand Central, $28). HIS killer unkindly murders couples at their happiest moments - when, say, they're buying an engagement ring or picking out a bridal gown. Don't plan your wedding until you've read this one. NASTIEST TWIST: The F.B.I. agent in Michael Koryta's HOW IT HAPPENED (Little, Brown, $27) is double-crossed by a fiend who leads him to a false dumping ground of murder victims. "The Bureau rarely fires agents," a colleague pitilessly reassures the disgraced agent. "We just bury them." QUIRKIEST SLEUTH: Charlie Parker, John Connolly's private eye, is chronically depressed, which makes him both endearing and unpredictable: "If there's trouble, he'll find it. If there isn't trouble, he'll make some." That predilection suits his heroic role in the woman in the woods (Emily Bestier/Atria, $26.99) as the savior of battered women. MURDER MOST BESTIAL: Poachers are killing black bears in the Turk Mountain Preserve in rural Virginia, which riles Rice Moore, the nature-loving hero of James A. McLaughlin's BEARSKIN (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99), a loner who finds the "complex social network" of bears far more interesting than the human dynamics at the local bar. MARILYN STASIO has covered, crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Critique du Library Journal
Owens (The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness), an experienced nature writer, puts her background to good use in her debut novel. Her descriptions of the Carolina coastal marsh add vibrancy to this story of Kya Clark, known as the Marsh Girl, who has survived alone there for years. Kya's story is intertwined with a 1969 murder mystery in which Kya is the chief suspect. The nature writing is lyrical, and narrator Cassandra Campbell does it justice. Unfortunately, the somewhat implausible mystery plot does not measure up to the quality of the nature prose, but the characters will keep listeners engaged. -Verdict A selection of Reese Witherspoon's book club, this should be a popular addition for most fiction collections despite its flaws.-Cynthia Jensen, Gladys Harrington Lib., Plano, TX © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.