Hi everyone, our August Adult Book Club meeting will be via Zoom.

If you’ve already attended at Zoom book club session, and thus I have your email address, you do not need to sign up for the August meeting. I will simply send you the Zoom invitation via email the first week of August.

If you’re new to the Southeast Steuben County Library Adult Book Club, welcome!

Adult Book Club meetings are on the second Friday of each month from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

You can sign up for book club meetings on the library’s website, by going to
SSCLIBRARY.ORG Clicking on the calendar link found on the library’s homepage and  then clicking the date for each Adult Book Club meeting, you’ll then be presented with a registration form.

Our August read is The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes

And the August sign up page can be accessed via the following link:
https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/adult-book-club-online-the-giver-of-stars-by-jojo-moyes/

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And here is a cliff notes summary of our July Read, Where The Crawdads Sing which isn’t quite as comprehensive as I’d like it to be; however, as time has gotten away from me and it is now August – I think I’d better post it, warts and all, so we an all focus on our August selection, The Giver of Stars!
The author, Delia Owens is a retired wildlife biologist who wrote three previous, non-fiction books with her ex-husband Mark Owen. Where The Crawdads Sing is Ms. Owens first novel and it has been a smashing success.

And just FYI for anyone that would like to check them out, and the non-fiction titles will all be available in the Digital Catalog shortly:

And they are:

Cry of The Kalahari by Delia and Mark Owen

Eye of The Elephant by Delia and Mark Owen

Secrets of The Savanna by Delia and Mark Owen

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About the Book Where The Crawdads Sing

Beginning note!! If you haven’t read the book, there are spoilers in this summary, so beware!

The book tells the tale of Kya Clark, the youngest girl in a poor family who, as the story begins, is living with her parents and siblings in a cabin in the North Carolina marshland. In one of the earliest scenes in the book six-year-old Kya watches her mother leave their home, suitcase in hand, and walk down the road away from Kya, never to return. It is subsequently revealed that Kya’s father is an abusive alcoholic and that is the reason first Kya’s mother and then her siblings leave the family home, leaving young Kya on her own. Kya’s father comes and goes for several years after that, and once, when he is sober, he even takers her out on his boat, but in the end, like all the other members of her family, her father leaves too. One day, when Kya is ten, he leaves the cabin and never comes back. Thus young Kya grows up in the marshland and learns about life from the natural world.

When it comes to describing the natural world, Owens is a master. She describes the natural world of the swamp, where Kya lives and grows up, with such insight and grace that the natural becomes a major character in the book.  For example, consider this passage: “Drifting back to the predictable cycles of tadpoles and the ballet of fireflies, Kya burrowed deeper into the wordless wilderness. Nature seemed the only stone that would not slip midstream.”

The book is really both a love song to the natural world, and the tale of Kya Clark, who in growing up in the natural world of the North Carolina marshlands, always feels a part of that world to an extent that most of us can only barely imagine. Kya connects with just a few people during her life of living in the marshlands, the elder couple Jumpin’ and Mable and two young men Chase and Tate.

Of course, the book is both a character study, of both the natural world and Kya, as well as a murder mystery with a bit of history thrown in for good measure.

The author talks about the history of the marshland, noting that outsiders tend to hide there as they can hide there, the land being worthless for commercial purposes, and goes on to fill the family backstory, describing how Kya’s parents met when they were young and how they wound up living in an old cabin in the marshes.

Even when describing things other than the natural world, the author has a flair. She describes the first meeting of Kya’s parents, Jake and Maria in this way:

“Jake swaggered into an Ashville soda fountain in early 1930 where he spotted Maris Jacques, a beauty with black curls and red lips, visiting from New Orleans.”

And then there is the intertwined tale of the two men Kya loves in her lifetime, Chase Andrews son of prominent local business owners, and Tate Walker a book and nature lover from a working-class background.

Indeed, the book opens with a brief description of the differences between the terms “marshland” and “swamp,” that the former is alive with life and latter is all about decomposition and decay; and then introduces us to Chase Andrews, or more specifically the body of Chase Andrews, which was found near an abandoned fire tower in the swamp on October 30, 1969, dressed in the clothes he was seen in the night before but missing the seashell necklace he always wore.

The author then weavers her narrative into two main timelines, with a third introduced at the end of the book. The first chronological time line follows young Kya during her girlhood in the swamp, relaying important events in her life including her one mandated day at school, to the day she first saw young Chase Andrews with his friends, to the time she first encountered Tate Walker and his subsequent visits during which he taught her to read.

The second narrative follows the murder mystery. After Chase Andrews’s body is found, the authorities discover that Chase, whom every local knew was a ladies man, was involved in a romance with Kya even though Chase had recently married. The preeminent local authority, Sheriff Jackson builds a case against Kya with circumstantial evidence, and she is arrested, brought to trial and in the end, the jury based both upon the fact that there was a reasonable doubt that Kya didn’t kill Chase and, also perhaps a bit because the local community, including the jurors, decided they hadn’t really done their best to help Kya when se was abandoned by her family and left on her own in the marshlands, and they felt a bit sorry for her to boot. So, Kya was acquitted.

And then the third chronological narrative begins and describes Kya’s later life as she declines Tate’s marriage proposal, noting that in nature, geese simply mate for life, and she goes on to live with the adult Tate in her family cabin and becomes a noted naturalist, earning enough money to build a modern home onto the framework of the family cabin.

Only at the very end of the book, decades after the trail, after Kya has died in a boat in the middle of the marshland, and Tate has buried her under an old oak, overlooking the sea. Only then do we discover along with Tate; when he notices that there is a secret compartment in the floor underneath the depleted wood pile. And after Tate moves the rest of the wood aside and opens the hidden compartment…only then do we have a clue about the mystery as he finds the seashell necklace that Chase Andrews gave Kya, the one he always wore, the one that disappeared the night before he died – in that compartment.

The mystery is of course, purposely, ambiguously solved in the book. I say “purposely ambiguously” solved; because I don’t think the author’s purpose was really to solve the murder, instead I believe she meant the murder to be part of her character study of Kya. Of what really happened to Chase; we don’t know for a concrete fact that he was murdered. We only know that Kya was with him the night he died at the water tower and took the necklace of shells she gave him back. However, I think reading between the lines, and after having read the entire book, we can say that it is likely Kya didn’t murder Chase but instead protected herself from, as she has observed wildlife do in the natural world, and that he died as a result.

And I’d like to say more on the book; but have run out of month! As it is now August, I’ll leave my general summary there and just sum it up by saying, Where The Crawdad’s Sing is a great book and was enjoyed by all members of the book club – so if you haven’t read it, please do! You’re in for a treat!

Have a great day and I hope to see everyone via Zoom on Friday, August 14!
Linda Reimer, SSCL

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References

Alter, Alexandra. (2019, December 21). The Long Tail of ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’. The New York Times., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/books/where-the-crawdads-sing-delia-owens.html

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Delia Owens, official website, https://www.deliaowens.com/