Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing is a 2018 coming-of-age murder mystery novel by American zoologist Delia Owens. The story follows two timelines that slowly intertwine. The first timeline describes the life and adventures of a young girl named Kya as she grows up isolated in the marshes of North Carolina. The second timeline follows an investigation into the apparent murder of Chase Andrews, a local celebrity of Barkley Cove, a fictional coastal town of North Carolina. By April 2023, the book had sold over 18 million copies. A film adaptation was released in July 2022.
In 1952, six-year-old Kya watches her mother leave her abusive alcoholic husband. While Kya waits in vain for her mother's return, she sees her older siblings leave. Her father burns her mother's clothes and paintings.
Alone with her father, Kya learns to fish. He gives her his knapsack for her collections of shells and feathers. Unable to read or write, Kya makes paintings of the objects, and the marsh's creatures and shorelines, with watercolors her mother left behind.
One day Kya finds a letter from her mother in the mailbox and leaves it for her father to find. He burns the letter. He returns to drinking and takes long trips away to gamble. Eventually, he fails to return. She survives by gardening and trading fresh mussels and smoked fish for money and fuel from Jumpin', a black man who owns a gasoline station at the boat dock. She makes friends with Jumpin' and his wife Mabel, who collects donated clothing for her.
The Barkley Cove townspeople nickname her "The Marsh Girl". On the only day she goes to school, the schoolchildren laugh at her; a pastor's wife calls her "nasty" and "filthy". However, she becomes friendly with Tate Walker, who fishes in the marsh. When Kya gets lost one day, Tate leads her home in his boat. Years later, he gives her feathers from rare birds, then teaches her to read and write. The two form a romantic relationship until Tate leaves for college. He promises to return, but leaves without saying goodbye.
Chase Andrews, Barkley Cove's star quarterback and playboy, invites Kya, aged 19, to a picnic, and tries to have sex with her. He later apologizes, and the two form a romantic relationship. He shows her an abandoned fire tower, and she gives him a necklace of a shell he found during their picnic, strung on a rawhide string. She believes Chase's promises of marriage, and they have sex in a cheap motel. The relationship ends when she sees in the newspaper that he is engaged.
Tate, graduated from college, visits Kya and attempts to apologize for leaving her. She rejects him, but lets him inside her shack. He is impressed by her collection of seashells. He urges her to publish a reference book on them, which she does, with another on seabirds. With the money, she pays back taxes and fixes her home. Her brother Jodie, now in the Army, returns and breaks the news that their mother had been mentally ill and had died of leukemia two years earlier. He says he doesn't know where the other siblings are. He advises Kya to give Tate a second chance, then departs.
Later, relaxing in a cove, Chase confronts Kya. An argument ensues; Chase attacks her and attempts to rape her. She fends him off and threatens to kill him if he doesn't leave her alone. The encounter is witnessed by two fishermen. Kya fears that reporting the assault would be futile as the town would blame her for "being loose". The next week, she sees Chase boating up to her shack; she hides until he leaves.
Kya is invited to meet her publisher; she takes a bus to meet him. After she returns the next day, Chase is found dead beneath the fire tower, with no tracks or fingerprints nearby due to the tide. The sheriff suspects murder. He gathers conflicting statements. He learns the shell necklace Kya gave to Chase was missing when his body was found, even though he wore it the night he died. Kya was seen leaving Barkley Cove before the murder, then returning the day after Chase died. There were red wool fibers on Chase's jacket from Kya's hat. Convinced she is the culprit, he arrests her for first-degree murder.
At Kya's trial, only contradictory and circumstantial evidence is provided. Kya's lawyer debunks the prosecutor's arguments, as there is no evidence that Kya was at the fire tower on the night of Chase's death. The jury finds her not guilty. She returns home and reconciles with Tate. They live together in her shack until she dies peacefully in her boat at the age of 64. Later, searching for Kya's will, Tate finds a hidden box with some of her old possessions. He finds a poem that alludes to Chase's murder, and the shell necklace Chase wore. Tate burns the poems and the rawhide string before dropping the shell onto the beach. Kya is buried on her property near the shack.
The "crawdads" of the book's title is an American slang word for crayfish. These crustaceans cannot sing, but when Kya's mother encourages her to explore the marsh, she often says: "Go as far as you can — way out yonder where the crawdads sing." When Tate also uses the phrase, Kya asks him the meaning and he replies: "Just means far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters." Owens's mother had used the phrase when she was a child. "Crawdad" is a regional term, and the book's success sparked a rise in online queries about the word's meaning.
Adrian Horton, in The Guardian, describes the book as "a fantasy of grit and purity", offering "a seductive blend of romance, murder mystery and feral coming-of-age". He comments that there are two timelines: a murder mystery, and the tale of Kya's growing up alone in the wild. In his view, the book's construction is not well conceived: in particular, the "implausible twist ending ... undercuts almost everything that comes before, if you think about it for more than two seconds". Further, he writes, the book treats the complications of relationships, physical hardship, and racism as "wallpaper", preferring to focus on its "central nature girl fantasy of self-reliance". Mark Lawson, also in The Guardian, calls Kya "a vivid and original character", noting that Owens manages to show how Kya uses calculation and instinct to get herself "into and out of difficulties", mostly avoiding the trap of making her a superhero. He comments that a coming-of-age romance could be sentimental, but that this tendency is countered by the crime fiction side of the novel.
The theme of ethology, Delia Owens' profession, the study of animal behavior, runs through the book. Kya reads about ethology, including an article titled "Sneaky Fuckers", where she learns about female fireflies, who use their coded flashing light signal to lure a male of another species to his death, and about female mantises who lure a male mate and start eating the mate's head and thorax while his abdomen is still copulating with her. Lawson comments that this "spectacularly extend[s]" the trope of having a wildlife documentary in the background while the characters engage in violence or sex. He adds that the biological "anecdotes hover as metaphors for the behaviour of males in the story".
Lawson likens Where the Crawdads Sing to Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy. In his view, its tale of "social competition and violent death" resembles a reworking of that melodramatic tale, with its mix of tension and precise social detail.
Aspects of Kya's life and the novel's narrative choices, including its attitude towards its black characters, are said to be reminiscent of Owens's time in Zambia, where she, her then husband, and his son are still wanted for questioning in the killing of an alleged poacher captured on film in a 1996 report by ABC News. Owens is not a suspect, but is considered a possible witness, co-conspirator or accessory. The Los Angeles Times comments that the novel "seems to draw from [Owens'] own involvement in the 1995 murder", describing the story of her time in Zambia as a "tumultuous history".
Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens' debut novel, was published by G. P. Putnam's Sons on August 14, 2018. The book was selected for Reese Witherspoon's book club in September that year, and for Barnes & Noble's Best Books of 2018.
By December 2019, the book had sold over 4.5 million copies, and it sold more print copies in 2019 than any other adult title, fiction or non-fiction. It topped The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2019 and The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2020. By February 2022, the book had spent 150 weeks on the best seller list. By April 2022, the book had sold 12 million copies; by July 2022, 15 million copies; and by April 2023, 18 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books of all time.
A film adaptation of the novel was released on July 15, 2022 in the US, having been scheduled for July 22, 2022. The film received mixed reviews from critics, who praised Edgar-Jones's performance and the cinematography, but found the film's overall tone incoherent. Audience reception was more positive, and the film became a box office success, grossing $144.3 million worldwide on a $24 million budget.