Book Review - Where the Crawdads Sing
10.04.2020
I heard about this book long before I finally picked it up. It was released a while back in the States and was much hyped over there before being selected for Richard and Judy’s Book Club. If there’s something I’m wary of it’s a book being built up a lot before I read it because I suffer from this combination of extreme excitement and very high expectations. So there’s way more chance of being disappointed and I’m more likely to be disappointed about that…if that makes sense.
This isn’t necessarily a book that calls out my name. I’m not very patient with large amounts of description and so a book set in marshland, written by a wildlife scientist and famed for its gentle depictions of nature is not a natural choice for me. The more I saw it talked about I started to reconsider but it was really my Mum reading it and dropping her copy at my door that pushed me to actually start reading. My Mum is probably the person who kickstarted my reading bug and if she wasn’t she was definitely the person who nurtured it, with a whole library of her favourite books from childhood saved to pass on to my sister and I. We have a collection of novels that we’ve both read multiple times and are firm favourites so I know where our taste overlaps. If she enjoyed Where The Crawdads Sing I might well do.
If you do pick this up and struggle with the first few chapters I would persevere. The description was as detailed as I’d feared and I found myself, particularly with my brain running in circles at the moment, having to repeatedly head back to reread bits that I’d tuned out of. BUT it’s important for me to stress that I soon fell absolutely in love with it. As I mentioned, the author, Delia Owens, is a wildlife scientist and has written a number of non-fiction books. Both her skill as a writer and her knowledge of nature are apparent. I’ve always wanted to be someone who was more in tune with nature and, albeit from a distance, this novel really helped me think more deeply about the earth and all the small, quiet parts of it that are so much more important than we realise once we’re caught up in our modern world. Reading it during lockdown has been strange because I simultaneously felt truly transported somewhere I physically can’t be right now and urgently desperate to go and explore in the wilderness.
The character of Kya is a unique one. Left alone from a young age to fend for herself she is, to a degree, wild but not in a sort of Mowgli, raised by wolves kind of way. I loved that on one hand she’s totally self-sufficient and in tune with the natural world around her while also being deeply human and, along with that, possesses a need for connection with other people. It’s a wonderful way to explore the crossover between two worlds and how they encroach upon and support each other.
The story moves between Kya growing up and the discovery of the body of local heartthrob Chase Andrews. As the two timelines move closer together so does the implication that Kya could be in somehow culpable for his murder. This is no murder mystery really, just a beautifully told story. The book is populated by a wonderful assortment of fleshed out characters who are never all good or all bad, just beautifully human. I’ve read that the film rights have been snaped up by Reese Witherspoon’s company and I’m not sure how I feel about that as the book was such a personal, insular experience for me. Either way I’m now an absolute Delia Owens fangirl.