Where The Crawdads Sing

This fantastical tale pits a young girl, Kya, against the world. Her world was an uninhabited brackish marshland deep in a North Carolina forest and estuary. A world that made sense to her, a world she loved and retreated to escape brutality and constant threats closing in on her. Her single-mindedness, self-determination, high intellect and grit to survive is an inspirational story. Fiction yes, but it feels very real written beautifully by Delia Owens, a wildlife scientist and award winning first novelist honored for her first novel and runaway best seller.

Unlike Robinson Caruso who was stranded, Kya studied the marshland from her earliest memories, she became expert in every nuance and recorded every detail. She ran to it to live freely as much as she ran away from the dangers she faced. She had spent long hours of heavenly solitude in the marsh preparing for the inevitable when she finally entered her hidden her marshland sanctuary. Her first home where she could be at peace. The marsh was in her blood after years of thoroughly documenting the wonderment she saw in everything she touched becoming the authoritative voice of the land, and its protector.

Rejected, isolated, and ridiculed, she still wanted to believe that people can change as the years gone by. That she might be able to trust again. As much as she was comforted by the stars at night, and the birds during the day, she had grown strong physically and mentally. She wasn’t the small frightened girl that entered the marsh for good all those years ago. If she could grow and change, perhaps the outside world had grown too. The time had finally come for her to accept the world was changing and that change endangered the fragile marsh ecosystem. The time felt right to accept the friendship of others to see her life’s work continue and become part of the permanent record to preserve the area from encroachment and her future looked bright to soothe her loneliness.

She believed the words of those more powerful and could see her dreams come true. To use her years of volumes of research, her sacred possession, to be a valuable environmental force she could use as a tool to save not just the marshland, but herself too. No longer a precocious girl, she was now a highly self-educated young woman, not the animistic caricature the locals made her out to be, but a fully realized human being on a mission that would protect the marsh forever. And after all she had endured, it was all at risk. Once again. She would not be stopped, she would not be denied the right to live and to do the right thing and nothing or no one would stand in her way.