We all love a coming of age story, and we especially love one that captures our imagination and lures us into a different scope of the world than our own. That’s the magic of a good book, and that’s the reason it took me only a few days’ time to read this book while others have been sitting on my nightstand for weeks.
Delia Owens draws from her Georgian roots to create the world of her protagonist. Even though I live in South Carolina now, I have felt for the past two years that I lack a certain awareness of this land because I wasn’t raised here. Owens’ writing reflects a deep sense of the natural world that is so characteristic of the marshy southern states. For all I knew she could have completely made up the titular phrase, but she had me convinced that “where the crawdads sing” is a string of words with deep significance in the world of her novel. She incurs the phrase’s power several times throughout the book, and each time it sent to my mind images of Kya alone in the marsh.
Owens begins the book making a clear distinction between the marsh and the swamp. I know little to nothing about either, but this book made me feel more connected to my fairly new Charleston residency. The novel is set in North Carolina, but Owens’ eloquent descriptions of the land and its history swept me away and made me feel like I knew secrets about the Carolinas that no Ohioan should know. I have to admit that I have referred to Charleston itself as a swamp, with purposeful irreverence in hopes of comedic effect, but I have a new admiration for the place I live. Owens’s descriptions gave me a better understanding of the ecological functions of the marsh, and the breadth of its beauty.
The novel explores the life of protagonist Kya and the few people that she finds human connection with. She was abandoned by her family one by one as a child, and left to fend for herself in a shack in the marsh lands. To me, one of the most important things about this book is that it is told from the third person point of view. We learn about Kya from the narrator, and even as we get close to feeling like we can read her thoughts or understand her as a person, we might want to think better of it.
When I first started reading the book, I felt compassion for Kya. It seemed that the chapters set in a future 1970 crime scene were in the background, while I felt entranced by the vivid description of her childhood. Owens lets us see Kya’s childhood up close, so we think we understand her. But Kya is as wild as the tales that are told about her. She is a social outcast, but Owens got me thinking as the reader that I could understand her like no one else can. But Kya doesn’t want to be understood. Even the one she feels most connected to, Tate, doesn’t have an in on her darkest desires.
As the years between Kya’s childhood and the 1970 murder mystery waned, the book’s end game became clearer. However, it was not tired, but rather a thrill to read–if not for page-turning action, but for the deep desire to know Kya and figure her out. What is she capable of? What will she do next? What did she do?
The grand reveal of Kya’s true capacities via the poems was a bit clumsy, but the idea of it was too cool for me to say that Owens didn’t pull it off on some level. Throughout the book, Kya’s poetry tells about her experiences in a way that points out the irony that part of being human is feeling completely lost at times.
One of the questions this novel takes on is the wonder of what makes humans different from the animals that inhibit the same natural world. According to Kya, there is no difference. She changes her opinion later in the book, which we disappointingly see from a point blank statement that this is so after she reunites with Tate, but much of her experience of the world comes from watching nature. She feels tied to life by the natural world, not by human connections. When she is in a jail cell awaiting her murder trial, she would rather stare out the window to catch a glimpse of a passing gull than visit the people who came to see her. Perhaps from this combined fascination and isolation comes her inclination to kill.
Kya is committed to never allowing herself to end up like her mother, who abandoned her entire family in a maddened state after enduring years of abuse from Kya’s father. Kya endured that same abuse, but the greatest was probably the abandonment of her mother, siblings, and finally, father. She waited expectantly for her mother to return, and searched the depths of her marshy home for an answer as to why she would leave and not return.
This abandonment has lasting impacts that reverberate throughout the novel’s unfolding. The juxtaposition of Chase and her father’s tendencies paints a picture of seeking anything but being left behind; Tate did so and broke her heart and her trust forever. There was something in Kya’s experience that couldn’t be healed by time and relationship that she felt she had to fix herself. Chase had taken from her things that were not his to take through his artificial promises. Like the fireflies and the walking sticks, she took advantage of male weakness for her own gain.
The unfolding of Kya’s story was one that I could not put down, nor will I ever be able to forget. Kya’s loneliness haunts me, and I still can’t figure out whether compassion or repulsion is the appropriate response to her murderous doings. Owens crafted a uniquely American story that is at the same time commonly human.
Written by Hannah 