Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens

Following a lot of hype, I was excited to read this debut novel by Delia Owens, set on America’s North Carolina coast, from the 1940s through an incident in 1969 and just beyond.

A novel full of descriptive text about the natural environment in which the protagonists live and grow up, the prose is often beautiful, if not more than a little repetitive. After a while I did feel that I was being beaten about the head by tree branches and found myself wanting to hide and read something else.

The main character – Kya Clark, or the ‘marsh girl’ as she came to be known – begins her life in this beautiful wasteland and, from appalling origins, becomes an accomplished academic. From one who cannot read or write, we are expected to believe that she reaches a level of understanding and articulation that most of us never do. I did find this far-fetched and implausible.

Kya forms a triangle of relationships with Chase (handsome, rich and therefore ‘bad’) and Tate (hard-working and at one with nature and therefore ‘good’). As a coming-of-age story it started out quite well but quickly fell into cliché and really quite awkward sentences that were nothing to do with the awkwardness of discovering the opposite sex.

The story back tracks from a murder incident and suddenly becomes a poor man’s (or woman’s) To Kill a Mockingbird. Court scenes which follow are excruciating and unbelievable, but, of course, our heroine comes out of it all with the dignity and vindication of some kind of natural goddess.

In the end, I’m afraid I rather hated her.
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Some have described this book as a classic. I wouldn’t.

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