Review: Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

4.5 Stars

Nature writer Delia Owens' first outing in fiction is the luminous story of Kya, the Marsh Girl. Although the story starts as a murder mystery, the heart of this tale lies in Kya's often lonely and isolated life out in the marshes near fictional Barkley Cove, North Carolina. Abandoned by her mother, siblings and finally by her father before age ten, Kya survives digging mussels and catching and smoking fish which she sells to or trades with an elderly black man, Jumpin' and his kind wife, Mabel. Kya spends her days observing nature in the marsh, and often goes weeks at a time without any human interaction. The only sources of reliable caring in her life are Jumpin and Mabel. They are for quite some time the only people with whom Kya even speaks. Determinedly truant, Kya doesn't even learn to read until she is a young teen. She eventually learns thanks to the efforts of one of her only other connections, Tate, who is a few years older than she is. When Tate leaves for college, another young man, Chase, seems to want to pursue her. But that same young man is the person we see dead in the opening pages of the book.

Owens captures the natural beauty of the marsh and its inhabitants so wonderfully and Kya is a character that engenders much empathy. I haven't not read a book with a character both so isolated and so inextricably bound into her natural surroundings since The Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter. This is a luminous book that I greatly enjoyed and am already gifting several people as a holiday gift. My only quibble is Kya being developed as a virtual polymath by age twenty or so. A small complaint in an otherwise very memorable book. I listened to the audiobook and the story was compelling enough that I finished it in less than 24 hours.

This is a book I'm buying in paper!



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