Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
For years, rumors of the ‘Marsh Girl’ haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society.
So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.
But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life’s lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world—until the unthinkable happens.
In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
The story asks how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.
My Review
It’s taken me a while to get round to reading this book – I say read, but I actually borrowed the audiobook from our local library. It was beautifully narrated and I think I probably preferred listening to it rather than reading it on my Kindle.
It’s been reviewed so many times that I’m not going to go into great detail. Suffice to say that it’s the story of a young girl called Kya, known as the ‘Marsh Girl’, who is left by her family to survive on her own in the swamps around the quiet fishing village of Barkley Cove. We first meet her when she is just six years old.
Her mother walked out one day, followed by her older brother and sisters, leaving her with brother Jodie and their drunken, violent father. Eventually he too leaves and she must now fend for herself.
She never goes to school, can’t read or write and must do what she can to survive. She is more in tune with nature than she is with people, though she does have a few ‘friends’ in the village.
This is a beautifully written tale – it made me cry more than once – Kya being sensitively portrayed by the author. It’s a book about love, loss, survival, and at the same time it’s a murder mystery and a coming-of-age story. It’s also a ‘celebration of nature’ (The New York Times Book Review). I adored it.
About the Author
Delia Owens is the co-author of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa—Cry of the Kalahari, The Eye of the Elephant, and Secrets of the Savanna. She has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing and has been published in Nature, The African Journal of Ecology, and International Wildlife, among many others. She currently lives in Idaho, where she continues her support for the people and wildlife of Zambia. Where the Crawdads Sing is her first novel.
