WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens, G P Putnam's Sons, 2018, 368 pp

 

I kept hearing from my reading friends about how great this novel is. They were right! It just hit all my sweet spots for fiction.

 

Kya is a lonely girl living in marsh lands on the edge of a small North Carolina coastal town. Her father is an abusive drunk but he is the only family she has left. Her mother took off when Kya was only six. She and her older siblings fend for themselves as their father leaves for long periods of time.

So Kya is raised by the marsh, its wild life and tides and swamps and waterways. When she must go into town for supplies, the "upright" people find her strange. They begin to call her the Marsh Girl.

As her siblings leave home one by one, she is the only one left to cook for her father and even has a period of good relations with him but finally he too disappears. She has to figure out almost everything for herself while hiding from truant officers and social services.

I know this sounds terribly dreary and it is. The depths of Kya's loneliness breaks your heart. Still, her intelligence and resourcefulness are amazing. The writing about the natural world and her relationship to it is exquisite. She makes friends with a boy from town who teaches her to read, opening up a whole new world for her. 

As years go by more trouble comes and finally she is trapped by it, even though she has become a young woman and has managed to write and illustrate a book about her marsh, even though she's had it published and made money.

Perhaps it was inevitable because she came of age, leading to her involvement with two men. Her unusual combination of intelligence and innocence could only lead to trouble in such a precarious environment.

I was full of worry for Kya through the entire book but in her own way she survives it all. A completely satisfying ending left me knowing I had read an extraordinary story.