Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (a debut novel) is a murder mystery, so it fits the usual genre of this blog, but it is so much more. This was a book recommended by my wife when it was published in 2018, but I stubbornly resisted until I saw it on the New York Times list of the 30 best audio books. Now on vacation, I listened to this while preparing for this trip, while riding on the airplane, and then while walking on the beautiful property of the resort I’m visiting. The quality of the writing is wonderful and the imagery of life in the swamps of North Carolina is elegant. The reading by Cassandra Campbell is perfect, and I agree with the New York Times rating of this audio book. 

 

Mostly this is a book about character development, both about the protagonist Kya Clark, and the largely hostile small town populace on the edge of the swamp, as well as those people who were brave enough to attempt contact with this mystery girl. Kya stayed away from school because her classmates all made fun of her clothes and her inability to spell the word dog. She was known as the swamp girl who only attended a single day of school in her life. One of those brave persons taught her to read. 

 

Kya’s family was a disaster. Her father was a raging and abusive drunk who eventually drove away his wife and all of her siblings. She was the one who was left with her father about the time she turned four, and then a few years later, he too disappeared from their swamp existence. Kya grew up knowing about severe abuse and impenetrable discrimination. There were a few minor exceptions which played a large role in her life. She loved the swamp land, studied it carefully, gathered books to read about it, and then began writing her own books about her observations. She taught herself to paint so she could illustrate her own books with incredible drawings of birds, flowers, fish, and grasses. 

 

Her first love abandoned her for college where he continued his learning until achieving a doctorate. He married another woman. Meanwhile, she started a new relationship with another local boy, but he then married another person without telling her about it. Like some of the insects she studied, she labeled Chase to be a “sneaky fucker” and she retreated to a solitary life until the first man came back into her life. When Chase was killed in a fall from an old fire watch tower, she was charged with first degree murder based on circumstantial evidence, but there was a very angry reaction from the locals when she was declared not guilty as the result of a very skillful lawyer. Kya then lived a long life in which she continued to study the swamp and publish her books. Throughout the beautiful dialogue, Kya often quoted a locally published poet from North Carolina, Amanda Hamilton. It was only in the last paragraphs of the book that the reader learns that Kya is really Amanda Hamilton. Following her death, husband finds much of her unfinished and unpublished poems. It was in the last couple sentences of the book that the reader learns about the cause of Chase’s death.

 

This is a beautiful book. Before I finished this review, I looked at the reviews in Amazon and I was surprised to discover that the opinions about this book were extreme, and I wonder if the negative reviewers were simply an extended version of the discrimination about which Ms. Owens writes. One reviewer from North Carolina thought the book was an insult to Carolinians which contained no truths whatsoever. I too have an extreme opinion, but my opinion is favorable to the author’s impressive work. The book is worth a 5-star rating.

 

WCD