Where The Crawdads Sing is a bestselling debut novel by Delia Owens set in North Carolina in the Fifties and Sixties. It has sold more than 4.5 million copies and topped Amazon’s list of Most Sold Books in fiction in 2019. It’s also a favourite of book clubs everywhere.
It combines a murder mystery, a coming-of-age story and a celebration of the natural world. For years, rumours of the ‘Marsh Girl’ have swirled around Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. In 1969, when a handsome young local man, Chase Andrews, who’s a bit of a celebrity, is found dead, suspicion immediately falls on the Marsh Girl, Kya Clark.
Shy and rejected by the townsfolk, she’s a complex individual who has had to survive alone in the marsh she calls home, making friends among the wildlife, and learning an astonishing amount about nature. She’s extremely clever, becoming self-sufficient since she was a young child. As she grows up, navigating her lonely life, she yearns for love, and two young men from the town become fascinated by her.
“Learning to read was the most fun she’d ever had. But she couldn’t figure why Tate had offered to teach po’ white trash like her, why he’d come in the first place, bringing exquisite feathers. But she didn’t ask, afraid it might get him thinking on it, send him away.
“Now at last Kya could label all her precious specimens. She took each feather, insect, shell, or flower, looked up how to spell the name in Ma’s books, and wrote it carefully on her brown-paper-bag painting.
“‘What comes after twenty-nine?’ she asked Tate one day. He looked at her. She knew more about tides and snow geese, eagles and stars than most ever would, yet she couldn’t count to thirty. He didn’t want to shame her, so didn’t show surprise. She was awfully good at reading eyes."
However, Kya’s new life brings danger, and the gripping plot twists and turns. Kya is a compelling and sensitive character, and the author’s descriptive prose draws you into her life in the wild, evoking the beauty of the marshland and its inhabitants.
Where The Crawdads Sing draws on themes of survival, of racial and social division, and ecology. The heroine is portrayed sympathetically, and her story examines how isolation affects our behaviour and how abandonment and rejection cast long shadows on our lives.
It’s a real page-turner, right to the end.