With all the extreme weather and temperature swings around here lately, it's quite a reminder that for all we think we have mastery over our lives with all of our modern comforts and technology, the world is actually a wild thing that we'll never be able to tame (though it would be a little gentler to us if we weren't causing extra extremes with global warming, but that's a different post). Cold, snowed-in days do make for more reading time, and this set of books, where the plots and the writing really reflect the vastness, beauty, and brutality of nature, seems like a suitable one for this time.
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
Orphaned as a child, Weylyn Grey was raised for several years in the woods by wolves; even as he comes back into "regular" life through a foster family and an adoption, it's clear that he still has a unique and strong connection to the natural world, as someone who animals flock to, who seems to have an ability to make plants grow in an instant, and who even the weather seems to obey. He's pretty weird and wonderful, and as he moves from place to place, the story of his life is told from the perspective of the friends who love him at each stage, all characters who are heart warming and humorous in their own right. I won't say more about the plot, because it's kind of fun to go into it not knowing that much, and just letting things unfold. Though I do have to say that I didn't quite realize what I was getting into in terms of the magical realism approach when I started, so I was a bit unsure about the whole thing at first - but then, I must say, I was pretty quickly charmed by the quirky, go-their-own-way characters, by the
imaginative scenarios of the plot, and by the central love story.
4/5 stars
Where the Crawdads Sing
Kya Clark is known by locals in a small coastal North Carolina town as the "Marsh Girl", having grown up basically fending for herself out on the marshes. Kya knows the marshes inside and out, and as a very solitary, enigmatic person, everyone is a bit suspicious of her - especially when the body of a local man is discovered and foul play suspected. But readers can see that Kya is not what the townspeople think; she is very sensitive and extremely intelligent, surviving alone in the coastal marshes as a small child, befriending the gulls, teaching herself everything about the wildlife and plants of the area. Eventually, though, she starts to yearn for more connection to people - but letting them in might turn out to be more unsafe than the wilds of nature... For me it got off to kind of a slow start, with having to build up the story of Kya's whole family/childhood history, interspersed with the chapters about a murder that seems like it might be related to her but is at first quite unclear how - but in the end, I would say this book lived up to the hype. I love a story where there's some mystery propelling things along, even if it's not a mystery book per se, plus this one also has elements of other great genres: coming-of-age story, love story, and exploration of/ode to nature a la
Barbara Kingsolver. I also liked the 1950s-60s setting for something a little different, and the great descriptions of nature in a type of landscape I'm not as familiar with. I recommend!
4/5 stars
The Great Alone
Another one that got a ton of hype - but sad to say, though I am in the minority here, I really did not like this book... Desperate for a fresh start, Leni's PTSD-suffering, paranoia-prone father decides to pack up their lives and move to a remote area in Alaska, where they will live off the grid and hopefully have a little less tumult in their lives. But of course the tumult in her father's mental state and her parents' tempestuous relationship comes with them, and Leni comes of age dealing with the home strife at the same time that she really finally comes into her own as she masters survival in the wilds of Alaska. I will say that I did love how evocative the writing was of the natural setting - I really felt like I could picture the beauty and the harshness of it, and this feeling of how it was the last frontier in the 1970s, where people really had to band together and to work hard in order to sustain a life in a place where the elements were constantly battling them (I even felt like I was starting to get seasonal affective disorder by proxy, reading about how dark the winter days are!). In some ways the story and off-the-grid setting reminded me quite a bit of things I liked about
Educated. But overall I just felt like the plot of this one, especially as relating to the abusive father but also in other circumstances (boyfriend getting injured for example), was engineered simply for emotional effect. Like gratuitous emotional roller coastering. Other than unlike
Where the Crawdads Sing, it didn't feel like it had anything it was really building toward that would keep me interested. Instead it just went on and on following Leni's life, going on for a rather long time. I know people love this one, but I just was not impressed.
2.5/5 stars
The Crossing Places
Forensic archaeologist Professor Ruth Galloway is called in to assist the local police in carbon dating when a child's bones are uncovered on a deserted stretch of marshy beach. They turn out to be thousands of years old, so it means an exciting new dig site for Ruth - but disappointment for Detective Chief Inspector Nelson, who has been searching for years for a missing local girl. As
another girl goes missing in the present, Ruth's involvement with the police force gets her intrigued in the modern-day mystery, and involved in the investigations there as her relationship with Nelson develops. The setting of these windswept beaches on the English coast is a character in its own right, as the marshy setting with the dangerous shifting tides and sinkholes creates a place where people can quickly run into danger from the elements, and where things can end up long-buried because of the shifting sands. But it's also a central part of the story because of Ruth's research about how prehistoric people saw this marshland as a "crossing place" to the afterlife because of it's in-between state of not quite land, not quite sea - and this history, of course, plays into the modern-day crime... I love a
series that's kind of "cozy" mystery (but not overly tame) for some escapist winter reading, so I'll probably pick up the next one, even if it's not my favorite mystery series ever. Ruth's character definitely makes me interested in coming back for more, with her complexity in terms of her self/body image, her choice to be the single "cat lady" that occasionally comes with self-doubt, her interesting academic expertise, and her sort of brittle exterior that takes some warming to but keeps things interesting.
3.5/5 stars
True Places
This one has kind of a similar scenario as
Where the Crawdads Sing in that it centers on a girl who has essentially raised herself in the woods, but instead it's set in modern day. That sets up a very compare-contrast kind of approach where the busy, comfort-filled, technology-focused life of Suzanne - who happens upon the injured girl and helps her out - and her family is contrasted with Iris' relationship to the natural world and the apparent simplicity of it (never mind the brutality, that claimed her mother's life, etc.). The veneer of Suzanne and her family's "perfect" life is pulled back as they see all of their modern-day privileges and comforts through Iris' eyes - but while Suzanne is filled with a longing for a simpler life, the rest of her family resists, causing the central conflicts of the story. Meanwhile Iris tries to figure out what all of these modern-day things even are, having never seen electricity, and has to figure out if she can live in this world. I was actually kind of surprised how compelled I was to keep reading, so it was pretty engaging despite the fact that I really hated how some of the characters were so cliched and un-nuanced, like the selfie-obsessed, self-absorbed teenage daughter and the workaholic, appearances-focused husband, and that I had quite a few quibbles with the at times overly obvious lessons the story is trying to communicate. Got this one as a Kindle First freebie, so it was a decent read for that, but
Crawdads is better.
3/5 stars
If you're intrigued by this category of books that explore the vastness and wilds of nature, and people's relationship with it, a few of the other novels I have enjoyed along the lines of the ones above include
Force of Nature (with a mystery element),
The Snow Child (frontier Alaska, also with a magical realism element), and
The Orchardist (surviving in the untamed American West).
There's a lot of nonfiction in this category too (
Wild or
Into the Wild, for example), but these tend to kind of stress me out when I know it's real-life people putting themselves into dicey situations in the wilderness!
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