Where the Crawdads Sing
I’m gonna be honest with you. I don’t read fiction as consistently as I’d like to. And I read even less of the kinds of fiction that sit on the New York Times bestseller list. But sometimes I do, and more often than not, I’m glad to have taken the plunge.
Right now I’m reading Where the Crawdads Sing (Putnam) by Delia Owens. It’s a book you’ve undoubtedly seen all over the place, a book our fiction-reading friends Instagrammed on the beach way back in 2019. I caught wind of the upcoming movie adaptation right around the time a gently used paperback copy found its way into the Little Free Library in our front yard. So I brought it inside and gave it a whirl.
It’s a compelling and heartbreaking novel about Kya, a girl left to raise herself in a shack in the marshland of mid-twentieth century North Carolina. She spends her childhood and young adult years in isolated survival mode, always tentative in her interactions with the people in town. For good reason: she comes from a long line of leavers, to borrow a phrase.
We learn right away that there is a death at the heart of the story, which may or may not be a murder (I haven’t gotten there yet). There’s also some fairly explicit passages about domestic violence and sexual assault, so this won’t be a book for everyone. Caveat lector.
Delia Owens is a talented, engaging writer who has written a page-turner. But Crawdads also has emotional depth, which comes (to me) as something of a surprise. As someone whose own childhood was marked by an endless parade of goodbyes, I empathize deeply with Kya’s anguish over the extent to which she will allow herself to trust, to hope, to love.
For people like us, the temptation to numb our hearts is real. To preemptively close ourselves off from anyone who may eventually hurt us—it can seem like the only option for survival. But it’s no way to live, despite all the very real dangers of the world. I know this first hand; I’ve got receipts.
Stories like these—stories with heart, stories that don’t sugercoat the awful stuff—might just hold some clues that can help us.
