Where the Crawdads Sing

By Delia Owens, 2018, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 379 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, Sept. 9, 2020

Kya Clark. The locals have long thought of her as the Marsh Girl, a mysterious girl who lives in the 1969 South Carolina backwaters of Barkley Cove. She isn’t what they imagine.

Kya mother is gone, and her father vanishes for long stretches of time until finally he doesn’t come back at all. Kya leans to feed herself, literally and metaphorically, as she raises herself in the marsh. She learns about life from the life around her, a smarter, more sensitive soul that the bitter, resentful person who might emerge from parental abandonment and a solitary existence.

Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

As she reaches adolescence, longing for companionship and love, she encounters two boys who each play a significant role in shaping her life. She questions how much she has to stop being herself to be with someone else.

She laughed for his sake, something she’d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.

Kya learns about life from them, too, her isolation a metaphor for the aloneness we all feel, especially in our teens. And the lessons in Owens’ story, about good and bad, loyalty and betrayal, friends and enemies, come to most of us through an array of acquaintances that hurt or help us. For Kya, the lessons must all come through just a few characters, a device that allows the reader to see our own experience much more clearly.

Female fireflies draw in strange males with dishonest signals and eat them; mantis females devour their own mates. Female insects, Kya thought, know how to deal with their lovers.

We watch Kya grow and see which parts of her survive but the coming-of-age story is only part of the equation; someone’s gone missing so there’s a whodunit subplot that keeps the pages turning.

Owens understands isolation and reliance on few fellow humans. Born in 1949, she’s a zoologist by trade and spent 23 years in remote parts of Africa studying wildlife, the subjects of her previous publications. “Where the Crawdads Sing” is her first novel and she allows us a peek at her connection to Kya when she writes, “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”

Whether Kya is one of the wild things or merely one who cannot live without them is left to the reader.

"Where the Crawdads Sing" is a beautiful novel that has sold more than 6 million copies. You will not be disappointed if you buy number 6,000,001.