What I’ve Been Reading Lately…

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

Given all the praise and general excitement I’ve seen for this book, as well as the problematic relationship Delia Owens has with Africa and African heritage, I did not expect to like it as much as I did, being a person who is immediately suspicious of extremely popular things. Where the Crawdads Sing simultaneously follows the life of Kya, an abandoned child who somehow manages to not only survive, but also thrive, while living alone and growing up in the marsh area of North Carolina, and the murder of Chase Andrews, a popular member of town who is also a known philanderer and attempted rapist. Kya is charged with his murder, shocking the people who know her, while the people of the town maintain their judgments and preconceived notions of the ‘swamp girl’, as they call her. This book would be a perfect work of art if not for the terrible portrayal and characterization of the book’s only two Black characters, which is where Owens’ polemic past certainly shines through. That descriptions such as ‘girth as wide as a piano’ and ‘ample bosom’ are still used today to describe Black women point to an all-white editorial staff and little to no common sense and/or racial sensitivity.

Cantoras, Carolina de Robertis

This novel by Carolina de Robertis is truly exemplary in that the five protagonists are all queer women, and there is not a male protagonist to be found. This was my first time reading a book quite like this one. Unless you count the dictatorship that Uruguay had in the 1970s, referred to as ‘The Process’ and an ever-present shadow throughout the narrative, even at the end when the protagonists are living in a dictatorship-free Uruguay in the early 2000s. Early on in the story, the five women buy a one-room house on the beach together, a place they can escape to during the repressive years of dictatorship so that they can be free to be themselves and live their truths in their sincerest forms. The narrative switches between protagonists, so the reader never feels as though they are hearing too much from one woman, or not enough from another, and the mental gymnastics each goes through is, frankly, impressive. They are always thinking about how they come across to their friends, or what their friends might be going through at any given moment or have gone through that could affect their response in the present. To have such a profuse portrayal of the inner minds of queer women is a gift that de Robertis has generously given us, and which should not be taken for granted.

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