Where the Crawdads Sing

 Had the chance to see Where the Crawdads Sing at the beach movie house mid-afternoon. Several friends, including Eileen, had read the novel and the great reviews this picture had received. I usually don't read a lot of movie reviews except for one-showing, off-the-beaten-path films; instead, I rely on word of mouth and it usually works out fine.

Hadn't seen any of the actors in this picture except for David Strathairn, who gave his usual fine performance as a country version of Perry Mason, which might give something away but not all that much. The scene of the movie is the marshes of North Carolina (filmed in Louisiana).

Kya, the lead who is on screen  for the entire picture, is played by Daisy Edgar-Jones (and at least two other actresses, I think, at stages of her growing up) as a "marsh girl" who is progressively abandoned by all of her family members, first her mother and then her siblings, who cannot deal with living amid the terror provided by their father in the somewhat run-down house deep in the marsh.

She avoids human company and manages to live and support herself alone until two prospective boyfriends turn up seriatim by taking their small boats deep into the marsh where they encounter her. The movie follows the three of them as they mature and also focuses on Kya's developing talent as a nature artist who renders amazing drawings of what she knows--the birds, shells, and other denizens of the marsh. The two guys in her life are played by Taylor John Smith and Harris Dickinson. As always with Hollywood, they're wildly good-looking but that has to be assumed.

It is well-paced, though some might feel it to be slow, but carefully depicts her growing up and having to deal with an increasingly present outer world beyond the marsh. She is aided by a Black couple who run a country store and help her at critical times. Strathairn appears throughout the pic as a country lawyer and brightens the screen with his portrayal. Needless to say, he gets his chance to star in the dramatic courtroom scenes.

This is the opposite of an action movie, although there are a few fights and violence. It pulls you in and I easily found myself drawn to the characters. There's also a terrific twist at the end which leaves you speculating about what you've seen and not seen. Terrific summer movie, but excellent at any time of the year.

 

Summer Reading

 [This blog has not been maintained so as to be refreshed regularly by me, who is ostensibly in charge of operations. Regard this as a promise that new posts will appear much more frequently from now on.]

We've been doing a lot of traveling this month. After trips to the Bay Area in California, central Connecticut, and Fredericksburg, Va., we're now at the beach--Middlesex Beach, which is a small sector located between Bethany and South Bethany in Delaware. We've been here quite a few times over quite a few years, from back when my daughter Vanessa was growing up, and this is the 3rd or 4th time we've taken the same beach house.

This is when we catch up on purely recreational reading. I'm in the middle of two mysteries that have been enjoyable in totally different ways: John LeCarre's last novel, Silverview, published posthumously, and The Bounty, by the much-published Janet Evanovich, with Steve Hamilton.

If you're a LeCarre fan, as I have been for a long time, this novel is fun. It is shorter than the usual length of his work and since I'm about three-quarters of the way through it, I know I'm likely to be disappointed at not having the opportunity to spend more time with the many compelling characters he has introduced so far. Normally, it took him several hundred pages, well, at least 350 or 400, to pull it all together. 

I like his writing because he captures so much about life and attitudes, as well as speech, in Britain. Much of his slang may be dated, but then, so is mine, since I lived in England quite a few years ago and my trips there since then have been less frequent. Nevertheless, his ear for different speech patterns--not accents, which he doesn't aim to present--based on class and locale is superb.

His characters are often complex and of course, as the novel proceeds, different aspects of each appear. As always, the differing outlooks of the several members of "the Service" are well-drawn and differentiated. When he passed away, I didn't expect any more to read and enjoy but this so far has been a pleasant surprise.

Janet Evanovich has always been a favorite of mine--to pick up in airports or other places when I need something snappy and uncomplicated to take my mind off all the usual challenges of the day. Her novels are not complex or searching; probably the most fun comes from seeing how her lead character, Stephanie Plum, a retrieval agent for a bail bond office run by her cousin, will get the bad guy into cuffs when in the argot of the trade, h,,e "fails to appear." 

But this is not one of the approximately 24 Stephanie Plum novels. It's the latest--4th or 5th, I think, in a Fox and O'Hare series. The principals are Nick Fox, a thief turned professional adviser to the FBI, whose handler is FBI Agent Kate O'Hare. This is sort of a chase novel--similar in some ways to the several of that kind by Daniel Silva--where the characters who form a team in search of what Alfred Hitchcock labelled the "McGuffin"--the object everyone--the team, the bad guys, and the cops are all after.

The authors have researched some famous places--the Vatican, the Eiffel Tower, Schoenbrunn Palace--to add some verismilitude to the fast-paced tale. I usually lose interest in the Plum novels when Evanovich indulges in allowing a couple of characters inserted to lighten the atmosphere get too much time of stage: a one-time prostitute who has become a sidekick to Stephanie, and Stephanie's eccentric grandmother.

On the more serious side, I am thoroughly entranced by a history of historians I'm reading: Making History by Richard Cohen. This is an effort to tell the story of history itself, beginning with the Greeks--Herodotus and Thucydides--and proceeding through the Romans, the Bible, the Medieval era, and now I'm as far as Gibbon in the 1700s. So far I've learned a lot to enhance my knowledge of the great historians of all time.

I really hadn't wanted to concentrate this travel spell during late June and July, after having traveled minimally during the pandemic since March 2020. As a result, though, I'll be home during all of August, which is when I've always wanted to be on the beach. Travel these days will likely become easier come the fall, which I'm definitely looking forward to arriving.