Book Review: Where the Crawdads Sing
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was published on August 14, 2018, and encompasses several genres — such as romance, mystery, and coming of age. The story is set in a fictional town named “Barkley Cove” in North Carolina. Kya’s home is in the outskirts of the town, where she lives in the marshes.
The story is like the tides of the marsh. The wave grows as you watch Kya, the main character, grow. It becomes larger as she builds life experience, and all comes crashing down in a final answer to the story’s long awaited mystery. The author makes the reader ride the wave with uncertainty; will Kya be convicted in this wave — washed away from everything she loves? Or will she remain victorious, and cling to her beloved marshland beneath?
At times I found the story heartwrenching- Kya, a lone child, is left abandoned by virtually every person she’s ever loved. She finds ways to deal with her everyday life — from survival tactics, to bonding with the marsh’s animals for companionship. I found learning about the complexity of Kya’s mind to be very interesting. Due to being isolated from society, she develops ideas of how nature is far more connected to human society than we would think. She projects social relationships she missed out on as a child onto the life around her, thus making the marsh not just her home, but her whole world.
The book begins with Kya’s mother leaving the family. This leaves Kya on her toes for the next two decades of her life — where is her mother? Is she doing alright? This event leads to the rest of her family leaving when she’s still a child. Now, on her own, Kya learns how to survive by herself. She maintains her house, sells mussels from the marsh shore, and becomes skilled at avoiding passers-by or truant officers coming to take her to school. When she is riddled with heartbreak and abandonment as an adult, she becomes close with the town’s heartthrob, Chase, to heal the pain, and he builds their relationship off of false promises. When he turns up dead a year later, the town points fingers to Kya for her reputation as the “dirty marsh girl”. Will she make it out of her trials and find real connections? Or will she waste away in jail — her upbringing being the stain on her life that she could never avoid?