My grandmother gifted me “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens for Christmas this year. I read it in a single day and do not regret that decision at all.
“Where the Crawdads Sing” is a stunningly written, beautiful story of a young girl becoming an independent woman, despite years of rejection and abandonment. It’s hard to truly provide a synopsis for this novel. Only a few short words can’t describe the heart and life Delia Ownes pours into her debut novel.
I want to take this brief moment to congratulate Dr. Owens on this book. She obviously knows her stuff, knows what she is writing about, and it shows. For this to be her first…let’s just say I can’t wait to see what else she comes up with.
Owens’ writing is so deep and intriguing that I was nearly in tears for the main character, six-year-old Kya, by the middle of the second chapter. The author presents us with such a real character and a real world that the book almost feels like an autobiography, as if Delia Owens was the Marsh Girl herself.
The book is the definition of the “found family” trope. There aren’t really words to explain the feeling I kept getting seeing Kya with the people she chose to keep in her life after everyone else abandoned her. “Found family” has always been important to me and touched me in a different way and this book left me bursting with all the joy in the family Kya chose for herself.
As someone who loves nature and the outdoors, reading all the details that Owens includes in this book were fascinating. Her words were like poetry, even the prose. Every sentence was perfectly crafted and molded, acting as a lens to a different world. “Where the Crawdads Sing” is a magnifying glass to the world of marshland, a place I’ve never had the opportunity to visit.
The characters were so well written and they were all so flawed yet so loveable. Kya was undoubtedly my favorite of them all, but there were so many others that I simply adored. They each had their own unique lives, motives, experiences, and livelihoods. I fell in love with Jodie and Tate and Jumpin’ and Mable and Tom Milton and everyone else. Even that characters that I hated I felt moments of sympathy or love toward.
I think that was one of the things that was so interesting about this book. It showed people as people. The “good guys” mess up sometimes and leave us screaming about their mistakes, the “bad guys” do something sweet or act almost human and leave us with a soft spot for them. No one is truly good or bad; everyone is a mix of both.
A book like this comes into your life very rarely. It isn’t necessarily the type of book I read all the time because, unlike my usual genre pick, books like these leave me so hollow after reading them, like I’ve lost something that I had grown to love. I already miss the characters and the story and the world that Kya lived in. I can’t wait to read it again.
A quick note for some of the younger audiences: Since this book is not a kid’s book or even Young Adult, there are a few scenes that are more mature. They don’t last long and are easy to skip over without missing any plot at all. There is also a bit of swearing and the use of some derogatory words, so be prepared if those words offend you.
If you’ve already read “Where the Crawdads Sing” or don’t care about spoilers, keep reading below! If not, I would go to your closest library or bookstore and pick it up as soon as you can. You won’t regret it!
Beware! Spoilers ahead!
(Be prepared for a very, very long review ahead.)
Wow. What a wild ride. I feel alive and absolutely gutted at the same time. I’m not even really sure where to begin.
“Where the Crawdads Sing” is just jaw dropping. I will start with the characters, since they were my favorite part.
Kya Clark, full name Catherine, is such a joy to read about. Her story is so heart wrenching. From the getgo, I felt very protective of her. It starts with her mother abandoning her, leaving her alone with her older siblings and a very abusive father. Kya is six when this happens and it affects her for the rest of the book. For a very, very, very long time, Kya is still half-expecting her mom to come home. Even in her early twenties, once everyone else has left her and she has dealt with heart break beyond imagination and even after she has become a highly successful author, Kya is still subconsciously waiting for her Ma to come home. Something about that just makes me so deeply broken for this girl. And it was a perfect way to start the book.
After her Ma leaves, every single one of Kya’s older siblings begin to leave. Even the youngest of her older siblings, Jodie, the one she is closest to, leaves her alone. Jodie is 13 at this time. The moment when he leaves, Kya is already so hollowed out by everyone elses abandonment that she barely notices until its too late. That was the scene that almost broke me the first time and it was barely the second chapter. This is the first time we see that “good vs evil” theme. Jodie, a character we’ve been shown to be protective and loving and caring for his younger sister, takes the cowards way out and leaves her so that he can escape his father’s torment.
Can we hate Jordie for this, even though he has shown how much he cares for her? Can we forgive this lapse of judgement?
For a while, Kya and her father skirt around each other, pretending that the other isn’t there. But then they almost connect, they almost like each other. The scene where he takes her fishing for the first time and calls her “hon” made me so happy. Her father is the second example of “good vs evil”, only vice versa. We’ve seen her father beat her mother and her siblings, we know that he cusses Kya out and takes every chance to degrade her, we know he’s a drunkard and a sorry excuse for a father and husband. But here, when they’re fishing and cooking meals together and going out to dinner for the first (and only) time, we see a version of him that’s almost human, that we can almost like.
But like everyone else, he leaves Kya to fend for herself. Only now, she has no one at all. She spends the rest of her life not knowing whether he just up and left like everyone else or if he died somewhere and was never found. Kya doesn’t really care either way.
Before her father’s disappearance, there is a quote that I really, truly love that I think defines Kya’s character throughout the rest of the book.
“Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”
Kya lost her family, so she found a new one, first in the marsh and then slowly but surely, in the other people who cared for her. Kya’s character is defined by abandonment throughout her life, but also in the rediscovery of love, acceptance, and care from others.
Tate is the main love interest in Kya’s life. He was one of Jordie’s friend, a boy we learn later who protected her from her father when she was still a toddler. He is a boy from the town who teaches her to read, teaches her to write, encourages her to be who she is, to love who she is, to follow whatever paths her heart sets out for her. He in no way makes her the scientist she becomes, but he was the first one who gave her tha ample push to get started. He gave her feathers, went hunting for shells with her, brought her books. He taught her poetry.
One amazing thing we learned about Kya at the end of the book was that she was secretly a published poet. Throughout the book, Kya quotes poems by a woman named Amanda Hamilton. It isn’t until the end that the reader, along with Kya’s then husband, Tate, learns that Amanda Hamilton is Kya writing under a psudynym. This was something very beautiful to me because often women of science are portrayed in books as cold and calculating, unfeeling. But here we have a female scientist who is also a poet. She is knowledgable and intelligent, but she is also incredibly in touch with herself emotionally. Sure she has issues here and there (a lot of them), but she understands herself and she allows herself to feel.
I’m not sure how I went from talking about Tate back to Kya, but I feel like that will be a common thread.
Tate is the next person who abandons Kya. The two are in love and happy, her being only 15 at the time. But not everything good can last forever. Tate has to go to college and he promises never to forget her, to visit her as much as he can. No matter how much I wished he would keep that promise, I knew he wouldn’t.
Tate, like Jordie, took that coward’s way out. He went to college and decided that he couldn’t have both high society and the marsh girl he loved. He made Kya’s choice for her, thinking she could never handle academic life. So Tate took it upon himself to remove himself from her life, but he did it without telling her. He just never came back.
I had grown to love Tate. The way he talked to her like an equal, was never ashamed of her, treated her as more than everyone else thought she was, believed in her when even she didn’t, made me so hopeful that he would be different from the others. It made Kya hope too. So could I forgive him for this decision? Could I redeem the sweet boy who cared for her with the selfish young man who abandoned her? That is the dilemna of the book.
There are two characters in the book, however, who never leave Kya on her own. Aside from the Marsh itself, Jumpin’ and his wife, Mable, are a steady ground for Kya. They are honestly the most wholesome and pure characters in the entire book. They take care of her and look out for her and they don’t leave her to fend for herself, but they also don’t coddle her. They teach her to take care of herself out there in the world, but they still provide for her. Jumpin’ and Mable are the parents that Kya never really had. They are some of the first people to get Kya’s first ever published book and the way that the two of them love and adore it gives me so much glee.
Jumpin’ and Mable are her first found family. They are her rock and I don’t think she would have survived or came out half as well as she did without them.
Then we get to Chase Andrews.
To understand Chase Andrews, a break from character analysis is required and we must jump into plot.
There are two separated segments of this book. One follows Kya’s life as she is growing up. That is a good majority of what I have been covering so far. The second part is the murder of Chase Andrews. We meet him early on in the story as a young boy on a bike, and the next we see of him is in a chapter that takes place many years in the future, in 1969 (Kya’s story starts in 1952, when she is still six years old).
Chase’s death rocked the town because he was their Golden Boy. He was rich, he was the school athlete, and he was the town player. It seemed everybody loved him.
After Tate left Kya, she tried to remove herself emotionally from society, but it left her with nothing but lonliness, a feeling that she desperatly needed to fill. She catches the eye of Chase Andrews one day and the two begin this strange love affair. It is obvious to both the reader and Kya from the beginning that Chase wants nothing other than her body, for her to be a trophy. However, Kya is so desperate for love and affection, to fill the void that Tate left in her, she doesn’t care.
It’s easy to hate Chase when he is demeaning or demanding that she sleep with him, but when he accepts her shell necklace and we know that he wears it until the day he dies, it gets harder to despise him. And it’s easy to mentally scream at Kya for her lack of judgement, but if you were in her shoes, wouldn’t you do the same?
She breaks herself for Chase and the result is incredibly sad. He manipulates her into thinking they stand a chance, convinces her he wants to marry her, and then goes off and marries someone else, without even telling her.
Things start to get interesting when the police investigation, happening in 1969, starts to point toward Kya. She is an obvious suspect to the people of the town; she was involved with Chase before he got married, plus she was the Marsh Girl who couldn’t spell dog that one time in second grade.
The two timelines, Kya’s coming of age and the murder investigation, converge at the court trial, where Kya is being tried for Chase’s murder.
This is incredibly inconvienent timing because at this point both Jordie and Tate, two of the most influential people in her life, had returned. Tate proclaims his love for her, more than once telling her to break things off with Chase. Jordie returns with news of her mother’s death after years of incredibly horrid mental illness.
By the time she is arrested, Kya is already in a bad place. Even though her two published books were selling great and her small family were incredibly proud of her, she had a lot going on emotionally that she wasn’t sure how to deal with.
It didn’t help that just a month before Chase’s death, he tried to force himself on to Kya and they got into a physical fight which left her emotionally and physically bruised. A fight of which there were two witnesses.
So the trial goes on. Kya sits placidly as witness after witness is examined and crossexamined and redirected. Her only comfort is when she’s back in her jailcell with the company of the jail cat, Sunday Justice.
The trial was incredibly intense, at least it was for me. I could see that there was no evidence at all pointing to Kya as the murderer, but the jurt was full of people who had grown up thinking that she was some kind of freak in the marsh.
Between chapters about the trial we get a little more backstory to what Kya was doing leading up to the events. We see her talking to Tate about meeting with her publisher out of town, which is her alabi. We see her talking to Jumpin’ about the same thing. We see her getting on the bus and coming home two days later. We see Jumpin’ tell her that Chase had been found dead, possibly murdered.
Waiting to read what the jury’s verdict was, I am pretty sure I held my breath. It was so tense and I was so afraid that Kya was going to be executed for a crime I was sure she didn’t commit.
But the jury decided she was not guilty.
The breath I was holding escaped and I smiled.
The moment right after that is probably my favorite in the entire book. Standing there in the court room is her found family. Her brother is there, Tate is there, Jumpin’ and Mable are there. But there are others with her, too. Tate’s father, Scupper, had come to silently support Kya and Tate after years of thinking her trash like everyone else. Scupper isn’t a very important character, but the way he develops in the book is outstanding. It’s the kind of development you see and cherish when a person with preset prejudices against a certain type of people realizes that he or she is wrong. It feels like a victory on every side. It’s an ‘aha’ moment for the character and a ‘yes!’ moment for the reader. Scupper is right there beside her, supporting Kya, when she needed it the most.
Also on her side is Robert Foster, her editor. He was a witness in the trial, but he stayed beyond his testimony to sit with Tate and Jordie and the others to give Kya his love and support.
The final member of Kya’s found family is Tom Milton, her lawyer. The moment is so sweet when they win because all he can do is hug her and she has absolutely no words to say. This was a man who believed her from the beginning and did not give up hope, not like others did. He trusted her and defended her and the victory was theirs.
This was Kya’s found family. These were the people she had chosen to trust and love and open her heart to. It is a simple, small scene like this, one that often goes unnoticed, that makes a story like “Where the Crawdads Sing” so important.
Family is not, and has never been, bound by blood. People will come and go in your life, sometimes painfully and sometimes gracefully. You can chose which people will be your family, your rock, your solid ground. Kya spent her entire childhood waiting for her family to come home to her, and they never did. So she found a new one, made a new one. And it is the most beautiful thing.
After the courtroom scene, there are a few more things I want to talk about.
Kya wasn’t the same after her trial, she was so much stronger. The first few days were rough, with her screaming at her brother, telling him how she wanted to be alone, how she was always alone. But she realized very quickly that that wasn’t the case. Her experiences in life had taught her that it was better to be alone, she healed when she was alone, she was safer alone, but the people in her life taught her otherwise. Jordie didn’t stay permanently, but he never left fully. She and Tate moved in together. Everything was good and happy.
There was a line that I really loved near the end. Kya, Tate, Jodie, and his wife went fishing one day and Jodie caught something big. “Lookee there. You got one big as Alabamee!” was what Kya said. This is the same thing her father said to her all those years ago when he taught her how to fish, when he was still there. They don’t really talk about her father much in the rest of the book, except to provide a little backstory somewhere in the middle. This was a little throwback to him, a little piece of memory, a happy one, that Kya had. This phrase her dad said being there really just lifted my spirits.
I said before that everything was good, but in the last couple of pages, things turn sour.
Kya ages 40 some years in the span of a few chapters. She and Tate grow old together, never having kids of their own, but loving every second they spend together. We see Kya’s last moments before she has a heart attack, floating along peacefully in her marsh. It was sad, yes, but it wasn’t bitter. She had lived a good life and died where she had always been most alive; with nature.
After her death, Tate goes through their house, the upgraded shack that Kya grew up in. In his search for a will of some kind, he discovers a box. In this box are letters written by Amanda Hamilton. I spoke about this earlier and the importance of it all, but there was something else that he discovered as well; the shell necklace that Kya had given Chase Andrews, the one that was missing from his body when he was found, and a poem.
The poem was entitled “The Firefly”. In a plot twist that I never saw coming, the poem depicts the way that Kya lured Chase Andrews into her trap and pushed him off the Fire Tower to his death.
All along, it had been Kya. She had killed Chase Andrews. Everyone who supported her and believed her innocent were fooled.
I was more shocked by the plot twist than I was hurt by her actions. Chase Andrews wasn’t a good guy. Did he deserve to get murdered? Probably not.
And here comes back that theme from before. No one is all good. No one is all bad. Good people do bad things and bad people do good things.
We all rooted for Kya. We stood behind her. Yet, she murdered someone. She took the life of another human being and lied to those around her. She decieved and manipulated and never once told a soul about it.
That is what makes this book so amazing. You just don’t see stuff like that in books every day. Books that make you question your own morals. Would you kill a man who had manipulated, tormented, and tried to rape you? If someone you loved had murdered someone for those things, would you blame them? Would you tell anyone?
It’s been a few hours now since I finished the book and my mind is still absolutely blown.
There is so much more I wish I could talk about, things I want to go in to, but this review is already so long as it is.
I would love to talk about the importance of Nature and how is moved and inspired and breathed life into the book, but there really just isn’t time. Perhaps I’ll do a second part to this. Who knows.
I’ll leave you with this;
Not everything is in black and white. Don’t see people fully in light or fully in darkness. Chose your own family. Make your own path. Don’t let the things others do to you break you.
You are strong and worth more than you think.
If you couldn’t tell, this book has put me in an inspired mood.
Go out there and enjoy the day!
Much love,
Caroline Noelle
John 16.33
