A thank you present for Paddy from Cristina next door, whose novel Paddy ‘proof read’ to anglicise the prose. (Cristina is Italian but wrote the book in English). I had to google this but a crawdad is slang for a crayfish.
The story of a (as regarded locally) ‘white trash’ girl who is deserted by all members of her family, but eeks out a living on the edge of the sea in North Carolina. She is obsessed with the natural world and, encouraged by one of her lovers (who deserts her to go to university) becomes an expert and publishes books about it.
Her other lover is the wealthy, spoilt boy about town in the local village, whose body is discovered early in the book; it jumps in time a lot. He has tried to rape her and fairly brutally, although they had consensual sex earlier in the book, after he has said he will marry her. She is accused of his murder, tried and acquitted as the evidence is pretty mixed. The key to the plot is that certain female insects bite the heads off their male inseminators shortly after copulation. It is a better book than this rather inelegant summary suggests, although at times a bit sentimental for me.
Comments