I am very late to the Where the Crawdads Sing party, but better late than never, right? After reading this novel, I can see why it was such a hit when it first came out. I really enjoyed reading it and had a hard time putting it down; I finished reading it in two days. I very highly recommend you read this novel if you are like me and are also late to the Where the Crawdads Sing party.

The novel is set in the 1950s and 60s on the North Carolina coast and is about a girl called Kya who lives in the marsh. At the age of seven, Kya is abandoned by her mother when her mother decides to leave her alcoholic, abusive husband. Kya, the youngest of the family, is also abandoned by her four older siblings, including the brother she is closest to, Jodie, and she is left to deal with her father on her own. She mostly keeps out of his way, learning to feed and take care of herself with what little money her father gives her. She goes to school for exactly one day; she is ridiculed so badly by the other kids at school for being “marsh trash” that she decides to never go back and runs away from the truant officer every time he comes to take her to school, until he finally gives up. She then starts building a tentative relationship with her father, who stops drinking and takes her fishing everyday, until a letter shows up in the mail from her mother. She cannot read the letter, but whatever is in it is enough to enrage her father and he turns back into the mean drunk that made the rest of her family leave in the first place. By the age of ten, Kya is on her own. Her father leaves one day and never comes back. She has no idea if he is alive or dead.

With no money from her father to feed herself, every morning Kya digs mussels out of the beach to take to a kindly Black man called Jumpin’ who helps her sell them. Jumpin’ and his wife Mabel take pity on Kya and they donate clothes and other items to her to help her get by. No one else in the novel cares to help the “poor trash” that live in the marsh, even if she is just a child with no family to look after her. Most people do not even seem to know her name, they just call her the “Marsh Girl”. Every time she goes into town, people stare at her like she is some kind of wild animal, and Kya is too shy and scared to approach anyone, so she sticks to the marsh that she is familiar with.

In her teenage years, one of Jodie’s friends teaches Kya how to read and write and encourages her love of the marsh. But it is mainly the marsh that teaches Kya how to live and survive. Where the Crawdads Sing is an exquisitely written novel; the North Carolina coastal marsh really comes to life under Owens words. You experience the beauty of the marsh as Kya experiences it and can understand why she finds comfort in the creatures that live in the marsh. But at the same time, is nature really the best teacher for Kya? After all, nature is practical and cruel and without empathy. The novel is about what happens when a person lives alone in nature with very little human contact their entire life, without another person to love and nurture them.

While Where the Crawdads Sing is mainly a coming-of-age story, it is also a murder mystery/court room drama. A young man is found dead under suspicious circumstances in the marsh and the novel jumps back and forth between the police investigating his death and Kya’s story, leading up how Kya knew the man who died and why she becomes the main suspect in his death. The court room drama aspect of the novel is equally interesting and is also a searing criticism of our innate prejudice towards people who are “different”.

Kya, like most young women, learns the hard way about love and heartbreak, and, in the most clichéd aspect of the story (there is a reason why it is a cliché, though), is gullible enough to believe a handsome, charming man who says he loves her and that he will marry her. She also learns through all this to not trust people and recedes further into the marsh that raised her, which informs some of her later decisions.

Where the Crawdads Sing is a fascinating, beautiful novel, but the final revelation at the end left me feeling a bit unsettled. Still, I feel like this is a novel that I could read over and over again, even knowing how it ends, just to appreciate the loveliness of Owens’ writing.