Book Review- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

 

A recent movie adaption of this novel with the same title Where the Crawdads Sing led me to this read. Although the movie is yet to be watched, this book has left me with a spellbinding story. The novel captivated me with its mystery till the end.

The story revolves around the wild girl named Catherine “Kya” Clark also popularly called “The Marsh Girl,” or “swamp trash”. She is a figure of paradox and prejudice in the remote North Carolina coastal community of Barkley Cove in the 1950s and '60s.

The novel tells the tale in two timelines that slowly intertwine. The first timeline describes the life and adventures of a young Kya as she grows up isolated in the marsh of North Carolina. The second timeline follows an investigation into the apparent murder of Chase Andrews, a local celebrity of Barkley Cove, a fictional North Carolina coastal town.

Abandoned by her mother who is no longer able to withstand her drunken husband’s beatings and then by her four siblings, Kya grows up in the careless, sometimes-savage company of her father, who also eventually disappears. At times, her survival in isolation comes close to superheroism. A naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life's classes from the land, learning the fundamental ways of the world through experience and later becoming a top-selling writer.

Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us.

It reminded me that the innocent nature of our inquisitive soul is the sole bearer of all the adventures that nature has kept for us to discover.

My final verdict - To the reader who appreciates nature’s effortless charm honored in fiction; to those who seek a love story every bit valid as it is tender; to the one who craves a tantalizing murder/mystery, and for those who tend to root for the underdogs of the society, this is the novel for you.

Quotes from the book-

"Some can live without wild things and some cannot."

“I wasn't aware that words could hold so much. I didn't know a sentence could be so full.”

“Faces change with life's toll, but eyes remain a window to what was...”

“Loneliness has a compass of its own.”

“Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive...”