Started On: December 19, 2023
Finished On: December 20, 2023
Format: Audiobook
Genre: Literary Fiction

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Book Summary:

For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.

But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life’s lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world—until the unthinkable happens.

In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

The story asks how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.

(Summary from Goodreads)

“Female fireflies draw in strange males with dishonest signals and eat them; mantis females devour their own mates. Female insects, Kya thought, know how to deal with their lovers.”

Review/Thoughts:

The premise of this book was interesting, but the execution didn’t quite live up to all the hype. I tried to start this book multiple times and I really struggled with the dialect and the third person. I ended up just listening to the audiobook, which I highly recommend for this book. It ended up making it so much easier to understand and follow.

This book had beautiful and detailed nature descriptions, and I could really picture the marsh. I loved Kya’s character and the descriptions of her emotions. The author made it feel real and did a great job of portraying her loneliness/abandonment issues.

Though I enjoyed some elements, this book felt like it was dragging. There were many long descriptive sections and I found myself struggling to stay engaged. The mystery was also very predictable. I found myself just wanting to be done already during the last quarter of the book.