Where to start. Unfortunately I just did not enjoy this book. It was not horrible but it was also not great. To compare it to Where the Crawdads Sing is very misleading. It's nothing like that book. The only thing the two have in common is the marsh. That is all in my opinion.
This is about a woman, Loni, who returns to her hometown to help her brother take care of their mother who broke her wrist and is in the beginning stages of dementia. First let me say that I would not have gone back to help. She, the mother, treated Loni like she was very unwanted. She was not kind to her as a child or as an adult. Sometimes you just have to walk away and stay away. Of course then this would not have been much of a story. Loni is determined to get to the bottom of what really happened to her dad when she was only twelve years old. He drowned in the marsh. Or he committed suicide. Or was it murder... Lots to choose from right. No one in this town seems to like her or want to help her. Her brother is oblivious to what happened as he was just a baby when it happened. Their mother never let them talk about their dad after it happened. Just buried her head in the sand so to speak and go on with life.
There is a mystery here and I figured it out quite fast. To me it was just obvious. But that may not be the case for others. While I didn't particularly enjoy this book it did have some good things. Adlai was the owner or operator of the canoe rental stand and it seems him and Loni finally started talking a bit. Maybe a bit of romance there. Although I found him to be a tad hateful. But that could just be me. Seems a lot of others loved this book. That is great for the author for sure. I think it was well written for the most part. It was interesting to learn things about birds. It just didn't grab me and didn't make me have any of the great feels like books should do.
Thank you #NetGalley, #VirginiaHartman, #GalleryBooks for this ARC. This is my own true feelings about this book.
3 stars and I recommend you read it for yourself and decide what you think. It just didn't do it for me.
SYNOPSIS
For fans of Where the Crawdads Sing, this “marvelous debut” (Alice McDermott, National Book Award–winning author of The Ninth Hour) follows a Washington, DC, artist as she faces her past and the secrets held in the waters of Florida’s lush swamps and wetlands.
Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Loni’s neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be.
Going through her mother’s things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forget—a childhood marked by her father Boyd’s death by drowning and her mother Ruth’s persistent bad mood. When Loni comes across a single, cryptic note from a stranger—“There are some things I have to tell you about Boyd’s death”— she begins a dangerous quest to discover the truth, all the while struggling to reconnect with her mother and reconcile with her brother and his wife, who seem to thwart her at every turn. To make matters worse, she meets a man in Florida whose attractive simple charm threatens everything she’s worked toward.
Pulled between worlds—her professional accomplishments in Washington, and the small town of her childhood—Loni must decide whether to delve beneath the surface into murky half-truths and either avenge the past or bury it, once and for all.
The Marsh Queen explores what it means to be a daughter and how we protect the ones we love. Suzanne Feldman, author of Sisters of the Great War, writes that “fans of Delia Owens and Lauren Groff will find this a wonderful and absorbing read.”
Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Loni’s neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be.
Going through her mother’s things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forget—a childhood marked by her father Boyd’s death by drowning and her mother Ruth’s persistent bad mood. When Loni comes across a single, cryptic note from a stranger—“There are some things I have to tell you about Boyd’s death”— she begins a dangerous quest to discover the truth, all the while struggling to reconnect with her mother and reconcile with her brother and his wife, who seem to thwart her at every turn. To make matters worse, she meets a man in Florida whose attractive simple charm threatens everything she’s worked toward.
Pulled between worlds—her professional accomplishments in Washington, and the small town of her childhood—Loni must decide whether to delve beneath the surface into murky half-truths and either avenge the past or bury it, once and for all.
The Marsh Queen explores what it means to be a daughter and how we protect the ones we love. Suzanne Feldman, author of Sisters of the Great War, writes that “fans of Delia Owens and Lauren Groff will find this a wonderful and absorbing read.”
No comments:
Post a Comment