This book review will certainly be one in a million positive reviews for what The New York Times, USA Today, Bustle, LitHub, and more have named a Best Book of the Year. But, I of course couldn't stop myself from completely falling heads-over-heels in love with this coming-of-age slash murder mystery novel that was set in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Delia Owens's first fiction novel is full not only of beautiful lyricism and a shockingly powerful story, but is full of celebrations of nature and independence and survival. With a main character you will cheer for and a murder mystery sure to keep you on your toes until the absolute last past, Where the Crawdads Sing is simply a masterpiece, and will definitely cement itself as a literary classic that audiences will continue to enjoy and honor for as long as we can enjoy novels (which, undoubtably, will be a very long time).
Delia Owens is the coauthor of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa. She holds a BS in Zoology from the University of Georgia and a PhD in Animal Behavior from the University of California at Davis. She has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing and has been published in Nature, the African Journal of Ecology, and International Wildlife, among many others. She lives in the mountains of North Carolina. Where the Crawdads Sing is her first novel. You can find Delia Owens online at deliaowens.com, or @authordeliaowens.
For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life—until the unthinkable happens.
This story is undeniably Kya, whom the author describes as "every little girl and one in a million. Kya is all of us. She represents what we can be when we have to be." At the beginning, she is a young girl abandoned by her mother, and then slowly by her whole family, and she spends the rest of her life trying to make sense of that—through the study of biology, especially. Completely isolated, Owens infused her own experiences of living in the wild into Kya's character, crafting a believable yet heartbreaking character arc of survival, independence, living, and (un)trustworthiness. I really enjoyed how the narration reflected Kya at each stage of her life. When she was young, the narrative sounded childish yet determined. Once she learned how to read and write, the narrative shifted to reflect Kya's new intellectual identity, especially as she begins publishing reference books and explaining and exploring the world around her. Being able to track character growth through the ways in which the third person narrator tells the story is a sign of a well-written and well-developed character, which Kya most certainly is. Kya's quests through the marsh not only allow Owens to build up nature as a character and to explore Kya's isolation, but they are also moments that help build up and explain the reveal at the very end of the novel. Another one of best ways Owens develops Kya's character is by including glimpses of the past floating through her present consciousness, which perfectly depicts the human experience and the way the human brain works. This starts at the beginning of the novel, but even all the way up until during trial readers get to see new moments of Kya's childhood as she experiences some of the hardest moments in her life. The author's identity as a scientist makes Kya's character development that much more intriguing; while taking a close subjective look at who Kya is, she also focuses on how the specific experiences of isolation and abuse will affect her character. I think that is why Kya is one of the most well-developed characters I've read. The combination of literary character development and scientific character development is what makes Kya so real, she essentially sings off the page.
One of my favorite narrative choices was when Owens took a short yet detailed detour into Kya's parents' backstories, before they had kids and lived in North Carolina. For me, that was a super powerful moment that explained adulthood and parenthood, and the expectations versus the realities in a devastating but truthful way. It also went far to show that we will never truly understand our parents or older relatives, because they've essentially had two lives: the ones before us, and the ones after. As Kya tries to understand her parents and the situations they endured, this is a lesson she truly isn't able to learn until the end. Without this quick detour, I'm not sure that revelation for Kya would have been enough for the readers. Even though it was probably the strangest moment for some in the text (I believe it is one of the only moments in the text of Kya's coming-of-age narrative—other than two breaks to Tate with his father—that completely skirt past Kya), I would say it's the most powerful in its ability to reveal truths about life and adulthood.
From the opening lines, I loved the way Owens balanced her exploration of nature with Kya's journey. Knowing the author's background, the descriptions of nature didn't feel poetic in the literary sense; rather, that the author was imparting knowledge and truly wanting readers to understand everything about Kya's life, from her vast feelings of loneliness to the simple feeling of mud between her toes. Some of the lines from this book that will stick with me the longest are the ones where Owens is describing the marsh, or the ocean, or the animals that inhabit this world right alongside Kya. The marsh itself is an integral character to the story in many ways: it mothers Kya, it protects her, it helps her survive, and it saves her in the end. When settings become a character, it's always intriguing to chart the development the setting takes. At first, it's an unknowable land, but as Kya learns its ways and becomes part of the marsh, it becomes as familiar to her as she is to herself. Watching how that came in to play during the trial and revelation at the end was extremely powerful. Through all of this world building and development with the setting is how Owens is able to create a celebration of nature in this novel.
The blurb makes it seem like Kya encounters two men at the same time in her life, but the opposite was true. The author describes it perfectly, that Tate represents the "sensitive, evolved human male" whereas Chase directly opposes that as the "raw, unevolved male." There is a lot of survival in Kya's story, especially when she is super young. When she first meets Tate and begins that romance, it is super sweet and heartbreaking yet right that it's the first time she felt "full." It is her first chance of really living, not only surviving. Chase comes in and completely undermines that, suggesting that love is something you have to survive—which, as Kya (and her mother before her) learns, that is not the case. The difference in the tone between Chase's scenes with Kya and Tate's scenes with her are stark. And yet, my favorite moment is when Owens parallels Kya's relationships with these men, using the words "then another. and another," the first instance used when she waiting for Tate to come, and the second for how when she keeps finding herself drawn to Chase. Even when Tate leaves her—an incredibly heartbreaking moment in the book in its own right—readers will find themselves rooting for him to come back to her, and for her to find the courage to leave Chase and trust in Tate again. While Owens is proud of her exploration of isolation in this book, I hope she is equally as proud of her exploration of the relationships Kya forms with both of these men. They're both powerful and heartbreaking in their separate ways, and both speak strongly to the human experience.
As far as Owens' writing style, she has a beautiful sense of lyricism that is contrasted sharply with the use of some jarring line breaks. While at first this confused me, I found that it was an interesting way to reflect a coming-of-age narrative with a murder mystery: while the coming-of-age narrative requires space to be told beautifully, a murder mystery demands that the author doesn't give too much away too soon, which is why I think some line breaks occurred where they did. Owens also had this amazing power to draw you into Kya's story, to the point where you forgot about everything else going on around you until you reached that epic finale.
This is both a murder mystery and a historical fiction novel. So not only did Owens need to create a believable story of isolation for Kya, she also had to reverse engineer and recreate how folks in the late 60s would have conducted murder investigations and make it exciting for twenty-first century readers. One of the ways she does this, especially early on in the novel, is not dedicate long chapters or a lot of detailed descriptions to the investigation, but giving readers just enough to stay on their toes about it. Another brilliant way she maintains this story as Kya's narrative is never letting Kya speak one word about her guilt or innocence throughout the book—not even when the trial occurs does Kya speak on where she was or what she did that night (which, honestly, makes the revelation at the end that much more shocking, because it is the one moment where she does speak on the event, without speaking on it). The balance between Kya's narrative and the murder investigation is well done, because it means that readers don't forget that this is first and foremost Kya's story. But once you get pulled back into the investigation, it's jarring, until it's consuming. It makes the ending entirely worth it, because Owens did such a good job at misleading and directing, making it both believable and shocking, and just utterly brilliant.
All in all, The New York Times Book Review got it completely right when they said that this book is "painfully beautiful . . . At once a murder mystery, a coming-of-age narrative, and a celebration of nature." I can only hope that Delia will grace us with more fiction. But even if she does not, we will soon be able to celebrate this book's movie adaptation, and can always find joy in a reread.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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