Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens*****

What a wonderful book!  I have admired and remembered Delia Owens for many years, since I read The Cry of the Kalahari, which she and her husband Mark wrote. They had met and fallen in love as college students, and planned to get married and go to Africa. That is exactly what they did. The part of the Kalahari desert where they settled was practically unknown to the outside world; the animals had never had contact with human beings before, therefore were not afraid of them. The couple would wake up some mornings with lions and other wild animals sleeping around them.

But this is about a novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, our book club's April selection. It's about one of the loneliest characters in all of fiction, a girl called Kya who lived in the swampy marshes of part of the North Carolina Atlantic coast. When she was a little girl, her  mother and all her siblings abandoned her to the "care" of her brutal father, who died a couple of years later. That's all I'm going to write about the book now, except to repeat that it's a book about solitude and loneliness and how they can affect a human being--and to say that another good title for this book would be Firefly.

House of Rose, by T.K. Thorne***

T.K. Thorne is a former police captain in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. She is also a fine novelist who has received awards and honors for her writing. House of Rose is her first venture into the genre of mystery and fantasy. It's a good story narrated by the protagonist Rose Bright, and it  introduces three hereditary and mysterious "houses," with two of them being at odds with each other. I said "introduces," because at the last page of the book, you just know a sequel is to be anticipated. The story blends the realistic details of police work with magic. This is our selection for the March book club meeting.