Nicholas Sparks Deserves MORE
Maybe one day I will pick up a fresh hardcover, out that week, and read it real quick, and write you a post about it, and you’ll say, “Wow, I haven’t even heard of this book it’s so new!” Today is not that day. Today, you will be getting a post about another book that it seems like everyone and their mother has read: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. To make our discussion a little less 2018, I’ll be adding a fun twist and writing not only about the book, but also the movie. I know, I know, so current, with the times, of the moment, etc., and sooo out of character for me. I’ve never really written about a movie before, so we’ll have to see how that goes. Luckily, I don’t have to worry about it yet, because I haven’t seen the movie yet, because I wanted to get my thoughts about the book down before they’re corrupted by the movie. Smart, right? Anyway, let’s dive in.
This novel was nonlinear, with the prologue taking place in 1969, before Owens takes us back in to 1952. In that short prologue, the main driver of the plot is introduced: the body of Chase Andrews (golden boy, best quarterback this town has ever seen, asshole) has been found in the swamp - dead, obviously. Back in 1952, we meet Kya Clark at the age of six, watching her mother walk down the path from their marsh shack, never to return. In short order, all of Kya’s older siblings (four of them) hightail it out of there as well, leaving little Kya with their abusive, alcoholic father. Essentially, leaving her to fend for herself, which she learns to do. By the time she’s ten, her father disappears as well, and from then out she’s truly on her own. Well - on her own with the marsh and the marsh’s creatures. And with the sweetest black man and wife duo of all time, Jumpin’ and Mabel who serve as quasi parents, making sure that Kya has clothes and shoes and food to eat. Whether or not Jumpin’ and Mable verge into caricature territory….I won’t comment. Apparently Reese Witherspoon didn’t think so.
So Kya is alone. That is, until Tate Walker tiptoes into her life. Commence romance. Tate is wonderful and sweet and basically a fairytale creature (more on this later). He is Kya’s first love and, I’m gonna kind of assume that we’ve all read the book, so while I will avoid full blown spoilers about the conclusion, I’m gonna go further than I normally would. You can skip the next couple paragraphs and move down to the one that starts with “In summary” if you want to remain unspoiled. Tate and Kya, love love love, hearts in their eyes, etc. But then! Dun duh dun…enter scholarship to UNC. Off Tate goes. Kya, never having been to school and also lacking both the wherewithal and the desire to be a part of the outside world after years of alienation, must stay behind.
After Kya has managed to pick up the pieces of her shattered heart post departure of Tate, Chase Andrews starts coming around. He is obviously the worst and undoubtably has the worst of intentions, but he woos Kya slowly. She’s craved for attention, has essentially no contact with the outside world, and innocently believes the lies he tells her. It of course does eventually come crashing down, Kya recovers on her own again, and life goes on. Some stuff happens in between, but to cut to the end, when Chase turns up dead, the judgmental town of Barkley Cove, knowing that he had something going with the marsh girl, weaves a story, arrests her and puts her on trial for his murder.
In summary, I genuinely enjoyed this novel. It was for the most part well written, the characters were for the most part three dimensional, and the nature writing, of which there was plenty, was quite well done. This last one is unsurprising because Owens, prior to this debut novel, was a conservationist, and wildlife writer. Underneath, or perhaps over top of (?) all this, it’s a romance novel crossed with a crime (courthouse?) novel, plain and simple. There is an added element of meditativeness (not sure if that’s a word), but the passages dedicated to describing the marsh and the flora and fauna that inhabit the marsh, do not outweigh the plot. Additionally, Owens’s deftness in creating these moments does not make the reader forget the clunkiness she sometimes runs into when working with her people. I was going to give several examples of the cheesiness, but in classic fashion I’ve gone on too long, so I’ll try to be brief and stick to one emblematic example.
When Kya is 15, not long after she and Tate have started spending more time together, he finds her laying in the sand, obviously in pain. Upon her mentioning that her stomach is “cramping real hard” he immediately knows that she’s getting her period. I’m sorry to my male readers: if you can’t handle this skip, but there are so many things wrong with this passage, I was howling reading it. First: that’s just not really how it works. It’s not like you’re hit by one cramp and the blood starts flowing. Sorry. ALSO, he’s supposed to be 3 years older (I think), which makes him 18, and again, I’m sorry, but I call bullshit. Maybe I’ve just never met an 18 year old boy like Tate (because they don’t exist - fairytale creature), but I’m fairly certain that the majority of them would not immediately know the symptoms of a period. Whatever - I forgive it, just like I forgive the fact that Tate’s shrimper father loves poetry and opera cause he’s a little different, and half a dozen other cheesy tropes.
I forgive it in retrospect, but honestly the most striking thing about this reading experience for me was how confused I was. Despite the prevalence of this novel for basically the past 4 years, I had never read the blurb, and had never asked for details on the plot. I didn’t even know the main narrative driver was a murder until I picked it up. The one thing that I thought I understood, and that I had been told by multiple people was that the in depth description of the nature in which the novel is set was very dense and made it difficult to get into. Every reader is different of course, but as indicated above, I did not agree with this assessment.
The one thing that I never heard anyone say about this novel, and the thing that struck me almost immediately, was that this is essentially a Nicholas Sparks novel. There’s nothing wrong with that - I went through a major Nicholas Sparks phase, and The Notebook is still my favorite movie of all time (rivaled only by About Time, also featuring the love of my life, Rachel McAdams, but I’m getting sidetracked). I haven’t read a Nicholas Sparks novel in a while, but roughly a decade ago when I read MANY, this is what they were like. My point is that this novel is good - even great - for what it is, which in my mind, is a romance novel with a sprinkle of criminal suspense. I’m not a snob, and as I’ve said before, I think making a stark distinction between literary fiction and commercial fiction is stupid. That being said, I was expecting something different from this novel, and so my reading was informed by the resulting discrepancy. The “cheesier” moments, which I often times live for, particularly in my romances, were harder to enjoy because I wasn’t expecting them. On the positive side, I am absolutely on the edge of my seat for the movie, because if it’s anything like the masterpieces that resulted from Nicholas’s works, I’m gonna love it. Back soon.
~~Pause for movie viewing~~
Okay, I’m back, and honestly that wasn’t much to write home about, so this’ll be short (famous last words, but I think I mean it this time). This movie was pretty much exactly what I expected. There was a lot that they got right, the things they left out were mostly inconsequential, the things they added added value. Did it hold a candle to honestly any of the Nicholas Sparks adaptations? No. In the wise words of my dear girl Lexy Maron (who went with me so that I could do my homework for this post), “That wanted to be a Nicholas Sparks movie so badly.”
On casting, I liked Daisy-Edgar Jones. She definitely captured the skittish energy of Kya, so good job to her. Jumpin’ and Mabel were wonderful as well. He was good and she was sweet, and they accurately portrayed the power dynamics (perhaps even going a bit further than the text, but no harm done) between the two of them. Mabel wears the pants. Tate was all wrong, and Chase was mostly right. Most annoyingly, they looked almost exactly the same? Tate in the novel has a wild mane of curly blonde hair, but in the movie he was just as clean cut and groomed and gelled as Chase. Lame.
I didn’t give much thought to the sheriff while reading the book - he was just kind of there. Dumb and prejudiced against Kya, but doing his job. In the movie, he takes a major backseat. I think this is generally fine, but it makes the case that the persecution eventually levels against Kya seem even more outlandish and ridiculous than it was in the novel. That in turn, affects the level of suspense. Instead of giving screen time to the sheriff, the movie ups the ante on Kya’s lawyer, Tom Milton. In the novel, he does not exist until he decides to take on Kya’s case. In the movie though, he provides encouragement on the one and only day that Kya attends school as a young girl. That’s probably the one element of the movie that made me realize there was a plot hole in the novel - who is Tom Milton and why would he do what he does? Owens doesn’t tell us, but the movie at least attempts to.
My final note content-wise, and I’m going to try not to botch this, has to do with race. Laying at the center of Owens’s novel is the idea of prejudice - and the wrongdoing that can occur when people are treated as the idea that people have of them instead of as themselves. Owens’s model and example for this is Kya - certainly an outcast but also a white girl in the Jim Crowe era south. There’s something a little ehhh about that, but I will give Owens credit for not entirely ignoring that element of the time in which her story is set. She talks about “colored town,” about the segregation of schools (briefly), and she at least makes an effort to portray the racism that would have been prevalent in 1950’s and 60’s North Carolina in a poignant but largely glossed over scene with Jumpin’. The movie basically ignored race, with the exception of one scene where a young white man calls Jumpin’ “boy.” Maybe Hello Sunshine wasn’t up for it. I don’t claim that the book did it perfectly, and I wouldn’t suggest that the movie is worthless because they barely did it at all. I get that in trying to make a box office hit, the romance and the crime stole the show, but it’s something to ponder.
When it’s all said and done, if you like romance, nature, suspense or especially Nicholas Sparks, read the book if you haven’t already. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to spend their money on seeing the movie in theaters, but if you are into the aforementioned things and looking for something to stream a few months from now, check it out.