Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is one of those books that will keep me thinking for a while. Owens, a nature writer, has crafted a beautiful novel set in the 1950s and 1960s about Kya. A young girl abandoned by her mother, siblings, abusive father and left to fend for herself in the marshland on the coast of North Carolina.
Kya dives deep into a lonely life, putting all of her energy into keeping herself alive, feeding the gulls on the beach, and teaching herself through observation of the natural world around her. Kya’s outlook explores what we can learn from nature, “Wonders and real-like knowledge she would’ve never learned in school. Truths everyone should know, yet somehow, even though they lay exposed all around, seemed to lie in secret like the seeds.” Kya’s world revolves about the subliminal, secretive state of nature. Owens drops seeds in her writing that grow fully later in the novel, silently exposing the qualities of Kya’s character.
Owens tells the story of Kya as she grows up and becomes rejected by everyone from the nearby town, Barkley Cove, except Jumpin’ and his wife Mabel, the local gas supplier and an older boy Tate, who teaches her to read and whisks her away into the world of science and biology. Weaved throughout the novel are flash forwards to a murder case involving the town’s prized possession: star high school athlete, Chase Andrews. Kya is later found and tried as a suspect and the reader gets to know and grow up with Kya throughout the novel, acting as a 13th juror in the court case that comes later.
Where The Crawdads Sing is a story that dissects racism, nature, the court system, and humanity through the eyes of a wild girl deeply connected to wildlife to the very roots of her soul. Kya is nurtured by mother earth herself and finds the comfort her life has lacked in the land beneath her bare feet. The characters will touch your heart and you’ll find yourself still wondering about mysterious Kya, “The Marsh Girl”, long after the final page.
such sweet things 