Before it hits big screen, read ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’

Achild left alone to fend for herself in the middle of nowhere, an unsolved murder in a small North Carolina town. Delia Owens explores both in her 2018 debut novel, Where the Crawdads Sing. With a highly anticipated film adaptation set to hit theaters in July, exposing the general audience to this marvelous tale is a must.

First we meet Miss Catherine Danielle Clark, nicknamed “Kya,” who lives in the swamps near the fictional seaside town of Barkley Cove, N.C. This novel is a whirlwind split between Kya’s isolated upbringing in the 1950s and ’60s and later in her life, when a former star quarterback was presumably murdered. The final chapters culminate in the two timelines merging.

To say I wept during many chapters would be an understatement. The novel’s prose and poetry combine in a divine way, giving the reader a choice to float near the top of the language or dive deep into the meaning behind it.

The heaviness of the plot points and themes are broken up with astonishing depictions of the lush greenery surrounding Kya’s remote shack and some initially timid and later, as Kya describes it, “full” conversations with other characters. Nature is a major facet to the novel, and the marsh Kya inhabits becomes a character itself, even depicted as the mother who abandoned Kya years earlier.

The murder-mystery aspect of the book is complex — an afterthought in the best way, it is a major point, however, not the main point. As a teenage male, I cannot attest to the depiction of womanhood Kya can, but it shifted my way of thinking. Anyone interested should read this gorgeous novel with as little knowledge of it as possible — the twists and turns are sure to leave your jaw hanging, your under-eyes humid and your mind spinning.

Readers may or may not conceptualize themselves within the Carolina setting, dealing with the heart and heartbreak Kya does, with a blonde, curly headed boy or experiencing the hunger for survival turned unexpectedly into thriving. With reigning themes of trauma and abandonment, the last thing anyone would expect is all the staggering beauty that is explored in Where the Crawdads Sing.

“She laughed for his sake, something she’d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else,” reads one part of the book. I’d like to think there is at least one tear mark in close proximity to that quote in each and every copy. Cynical almost, how the novel traps its reader. Many find the first part of the book boring — oblivious to how in the long run it is exactly what lured them into the rest of the tale.

What Owens has done here is no easy feat — merging the landscape with a character and strangely never quite separating them. When asked by CBS if she ever got lonely in the vast Earth, she simply responded, “I do; I wrote a book about it,” hinting at how in the novel her main character was mostly alone physically but made company.

Where The Crawdads Sing topped the New York Times fiction bestsellers list for weeks upon its release, resonating with readers everywhere. Try as anyone must, words cannot recommend this phenomenal masterpiece of art adequately; you simply must pick up a copy and get lost “way out yonder where the crawdads sing.”