Between the Lines - Where the Crawdads Sing
October’s Pick - Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
Thoughts
First and foremost Where the Crawdads Sing is a carefully crafted and beautiful ode to nature, but it is also a moving coming of age story all wrapped up in a riveting murder mystery. The story opens in 1969 with two young boys finding the dead body of Chase Andrews, a handsome and popular figure in the small town of Barkley Cove. The townspeople suspect foul play and direct their suspicions towards a young woman named, Kya Clark, who they call the Marsh Girl. Jump back to 1952 and we meet Kya as a 6 year old living in poverty in the marsh with her broken family. One by one her family members go, leaving Kya with her violent, alcoholic father until he, too, one day disappears. The novel moves back and forth between the investigation of Chase’s death and Kya’s childhood to young adulthood, until the two time periods meet. Although I was interested in Chase’s mysterious death, it is the story of Kya and the lush detailed portrayal of the Carolina coast that made the book for me. Owens beautifully sets the scene: you hear the gulls, feel the ocean spray, smell the mud, and see the moonlight play on the water. Kya is an unforgettable heroine whose resourcefulness, resiliency and intelligence keep her alive. Seeing the world through this child’s eyes gave me pause. This is a little girl whose only family is the natural world and although it is magnificent world in Owen’s hands, it is still crushingly isolated and lonely. The lessons she learns are found in the fine details of the sweeping and oftentimes harsh beauty of nature. Kya becomes a careful observer of her environment; with no adult to provide guidance, she is left to navigate everything through instinct and observation. When she ultimately finds human connection, the heavy loneliness of her story lifts, and you can finally sigh in relief, finally feel comfortable. This is Owens first novel, however it is not her first book. She has a PhD in Animal Behavior and spent over two decades in remote parts of Africa conducting research with her husband, Mark. Out of that experience came 3 best-selling non fiction books about her life there as a wildlife scientist. The rich beauty of Where the Crawdads Sing seems most certainly born out of her knowledge of the natural world and her understanding of isolation as experienced during those 23 years in Africa.
Overall
I strongly recommend you read Where the Crawdads Sing. In spite of it's enormous popularity, there are detractors, and as I read their reviews, I found some of their complaints warranted: implausible that a little girl could survive on her own all those years, dialect issues (which I took their word on being a Californian) and some simply didn't enjoy that much natural world description. However, their negative comments were not enough to make me reconsider my recommendation. I am late to the Where the Crawdads Sing party, but I am glad I made it at last. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and found myself in tears at the end. If a mark of a good novel is that it leaves you expanded in some way then Owens accomplishes just that; Kya and the North Carolina coast came to life for me making a deep impression on my imagination and thereby enriching my inner world.
P. S.
Look for the movie. Fox 2000 owns the film rights and Reese Witherspoon’s media company, Hello Sunshine, is set to produce the feature film adaptation. Reese selected Where the Crawdads Sing for inclusion in her Reese’s Book Club and Owens debut novel took off from there. It has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 60 weeks. I can see the ways in which this book will come to life on the big screen, but PLEASE read the book first as the two are bound to be very different experiences. The quiet, the beauty, the solitude, the wordlessness of the Carolina coast is the current that moves this painfully beautiful book forward. I cannot imagine how the natural world will translate in a way that won’t bore audiences, and I suspect that the novel’s strongest elements will take a back seat in Hollywood’s retelling. But don’t get me wrong; there’s a murder mystery and a coming of age story that movie-goers will undoubtedly be drawn to, and I look forward to that story as well.
Kathryn