Where The Crawdads Sing

The Basics

Cover for Where The Crawdads Sing. Credit: Delia Owens.

Title: Where the Crawdads Sing

Author: Delia Owens

Year: 2018

Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons, PRH

ISBN: 978-0-7352-1911-3

*I listened to the audiobook, which is why I am not providing direct quotes and page numbers.

Summary:

Part coming-of-age, romance, and mystery—Where The Crawdads Sing follows Kya from her childhood into adulthood as she explores and appreciates the marsh and swampland she has lived on since birth. On the water she finds love…and herself, but all is not as it seems. When Chase Andrews, the beloved small-town high school football idol, is found dead in the swamp, the town quickly turns on Kya—the poor reject of the marshes—and she must learn what it takes to stand up for herself…and be herself.

The Review

I’m a little late to the game for this book, but better late than never! This book has been on my TBR since it took people’s bookshelves by storm. I initially got lured in by the mystery/crime elements. That said, this book ended up being a lot more than I expected…though not entirely in good ways. While I appreciated the development of Kya’s character and the consistency Owens gave her, I think the plot of this book was trying to do too much—thus, it lands a 5.5/10 stars from me. 

The Good: Character

Without a doubt, the character Kya will live on in me for a while. Owens did a beautiful job characterizing Kya. She uses setting, side characters, work, and plot to shape and develop her. Owens clearly has a firm grasp of the setting (North Carolina). Additionally, she does a good job considering how a rural setting, poverty, and other traumatic experiences would shape a person as they grow up. Kya’s personality and characterization makes sense and fits her context.

I also have to say that, while it may or may not be purposeful, I feel like Kya also fulfills a unique role because she has mannerisms and characteristics that makes her more neurodivergent-coded (ADHD or Autism). While some of these things could be argued as results of trauma/her circumstances, as someone who is AuDHD (autistic and adhd), I saw A LOT of myself reflected in this character. Kya has a special interest in her marsh and often is fixated on understanding the natural processes of the land. She goes as far as collecting and studying the many plants, animals, fungi, etc. of the marshes. She has shelves and walls covered in her collections. She has a hard time interacting with people and understanding/following social norms. She tends to prefer being alone, sometimes not speaking for long periods. She gets overstimulated in more busy/urban areas. She also has a very literal way of thinking and often applies the rigid facts she knows of the natural world to less rigid social situations. All of these things, in my opinion, make her especially autism-coded, which I thought was a unique aspect of this book. It isn’t often that we see neurodivergence, especially autism, well portrayed in books—especially by female characters.

The Bad: Structure & Plot

I think the Achilles heel of this book is its plotting and structure. The book is nonlinear and has two co-occurring threads. The first starts with and follows Kya as a child and leads into the present (and her adulthood). The second starts in the present and follows the start of the murder investigation of Chase Andrews. Eventually, they merge near the end of the book. The issue is, the first strand is entirely exposition to the murder that happens—except it is exposition of Kya’s life specifically. These two strands felt incredibly incongruous until they merged. Rather than working together, for a while it felt like two completely different stories were stuck together. I think a linear structure would have been better for this book. It could have been separated into part 1 and part 2 if needed, but I felt confused and bothered by the alternating strands for most of the book. 

The start of the book had me invested in the initial strand of Kya’s coming-to-age story. I genuinely wanted to see her find herself and her place in the world. It was confusing jumping from a young Kya to seemingly disconnected police investigation chapters. At that point, I just wanted to stick to her coming-of-age story. In fact, I reached a point around half-way through the book where I sat back and was like “the book could end here and I would be entirely satisfied,” but then it continued. 

The secondary strand was confusing at first, and while later on it did make more sense and I did get invested in the murder mystery element of the story, the ending of the book ruined the satisfaction I felt. The book end left me confused and a bit upset at the messaging. I’ll come back to this point.

The other thing that bothered me in this book is the strange romantic relationship between Kya and Tate. Before dating, Kya grew up looking up to Tate as a big brother. She sees him as her last connection to her actual brother, who was friends with Tate before he left. He’s family. Kya and Tate start to “date” when she is 15 and he is 19 (he even suggests marriage during this period). That said, in the text the narration suggests he held romantic feelings for her before then. Online, I’ve seen two sides to this subject. The people who are like me and think Tate is grooming her and others who are claiming that this is “just what happened back then.” 

I found myself deeply uncomfortable by Tate’s actions. Though he says they should wait until she is older to have sex, he is still a legal adult kissing on and flirting with a child. This is especially bothersome to me, because Kya is a child with no support system/family and her one friend is Tate. Her circumstances worsen Tate’s actions for me, because Kya’s situation may make her go along with more than she would if she had a healthy support system and family around her. She also is not well informed of social customs, reproduction, or sexual health—which places her at greater risk of abuse because she doesn’t necessarily know or have anyone around her who knows what is and isn’t customary/safe. 

That said, I was curious to see what history has to say for itself, as I am approaching this with a modern lens of this relationship. According to the CDC Vital Report for 1960 (the year Kya would have been 14), the “median age of brides at first marriage declined from 21.4 years in 1951 to 20.1 years in 1960 and for grooms from 23.8 in 1951 to 23.1 in 1960.” Additionally, “brides 20 years of age or under most often married grooms 1 to 3 years older.” In the 1950s, the U.S. also saw a rise in popularity of individual dating and “going steady” with a partner, and the 1960s started to make sexual intimacy more normalized. All together, I think this places Kya and Tate’s relationship as a less-likely extreme. It is outside that 1-3 year window (as he is four years older), but their later courtship and “marriage” technically is sound. 

The Author, Addressing Racism, and the Ending [Contains Spoilers]

Just as any type of art, creative writing often produces the question “can we separate the art from the artist?” We have seen many a problematic author produce well-loved and acclaimed books (e.g., J.K. Rowling, Orson Scott Card, etc.). When this happens, the public often starts to question if their stories should be bought—if we should support artists who are harmful to people. I have always had trouble with this subject, because I genuinely believe that every person is capable of writing a good story (just as easily as a bad one, I suppose). People who have done bad things have written great books—books that we can learn from, even if they are imperfect. Personally, in such situations I tend to lean towards thrifting a book and supporting a small second hand store over the author and the publication machine. That said, I am not here to give an answer to this issue, and I don’t have one. I do want to address the issues this book has with racism and the strange ties it has to the author’s past, though. 

Delia Owens is primarily an American Zoologist that, before this book, was known for her environmental conservation work and publications in Botswana and Zambia. That said, closer research had me come across an opinion piece by Brianna O’Reilly on The Black Project. O’Reilly’s main assertions were that Owens and her book were racist. O’Reilly’s comments made me curious about Owens’ past. On her website, her biography is very telling. 

Owens was born in Southern Georgia in the 1950s to a mother she describes as “an outside-girl.” She grew up in a small town close to its inhabitants but with a wild love for the outdoors. She states that she “since childhood has thought of Nature as a true companion. One of her best friends.” Interestingly enough, these things nearly mirror her character Kya in Where the Crawdads Sing. Owens’ biography has a second section that is titled “The Africa Years.” Things in here get a little weird. Some direct quotes from the page include:

“They set up a basic campsite in an area so remote they were the only two people, except for a few bands of roving Bushmen, in an area the size of Ireland.”

“Besides studying elephants, Delia and Mark established a program that offered jobs, loans, and other assistance to local villagers so they would not have to poach wildlife for a living.”

These quotes hint at the racism that O'Reilly first claims. O’Reilly looks at it as white saviorism, which honestly may not be far from the truth. 

Owens neglects a lot of contextual information in her biography about why she (with her husband) moved between countries. The Owenses were expelled from Botswana by the government for their criticisms of the government’s conservation work. Thus, they moved their work to Zambia, but somehow it got worse. “On March 30, 1996, the ABC news-magazine show Turning Point featured a documentary about a pair of American conservationists titled ‘Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story.’” This documentary has been described as essentially a snuff film, as it captured the murder of an animal poacher. While other problematic assertions remain around other possible murders, the Owenses to this day remain wanted for questioning in Zambia in relation to that videocapture. Furthermore, many journalists have encountered racism with Delia Owens past and present. “‘The Owenses,’ [one journalist] wrote, ‘gained a reputation for resenting the presence of Africans amid the animals they had come to study and protect.’” In this way, we see O’Reilly’s assertions of racism in Owens’ past validated. 

Looking more closely at the book itself, I think O’Reilly’s observations about the Black stereotyping/tropes is accurate. O’Reilly brings up two main tropes that are seen in the book: the magical negro and the mammy. These two stereotypes are both harmful tropes of Black characters seen in American media (especially books and movies). The magical negro is a trope in which a supporting (side) character who is Black comes to the aid of a white protagonist. Often, this character offers aid and support without expecting anything from the protagonist. This trope is seen in the character of Jumpin’—who comes to Kya’s aid and gives her continued support throughout her childhood for no apparent reason other than goodwill or luck. The mammy stereotype is a U.S. born stereotype born out of the country’s history of slavery. The stereotype places Black women in a role in which they are motherly and taking care of (white) children and housework. In Where the Crawdads Sing this stereotype is seen in the character of Mabel, who becomes a replacement mother for Kya and provides her with information and resources. Aside from these two characters, there aren’t really any other characters of color. Some may consider that a feature of it being a rural, small-town setting in the Jim Crow era South with a white main character, others may simply view it as racist. 

The other aspect of this book that bothers me—with Owens still wanted for questioning for a murder she may or may not have been involved in—is how the book ends. At the end, Kya dies later in life and Tate discovers a box with the old shell necklace she had given Chase inside. The implication of this being that Kya had in fact planned and orchestrated his murder and gotten away with it. Alongside the strong humanization of Kya and her story, this information seems to pose the question “is murder sometimes okay?” I think this question is dangerous, especially alongside Owens own past. It seems to support vigilante justice and places a person’s own ethics and beliefs above the law. All together, that is an incredibly dangerous claim to make. While I can appreciate it may come off as empowering for survivors of sexual assault, and a good testament to how biased criminal justice systems revictimize such individuals, it all falls too close Owens’ own story for me to appreciate the ending. 

As always, thanks for reading! Share your thoughts about this book in the comments.

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