Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

        

            Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens, is a book that takes you through the life of a young woman, from her childhood to her 20s, and portrays how her isolation as a child shaped her into who she is. Kya Clark is the main character of this book. Her mother abandoned her as a little girl and then, one by one, her siblings did the same to run away from their abusive father. Eventually, Kya’s father left her too. Kya had only spent one day in school her entire life, where she was made fun of for looking dirty and poor. In the small fishing town where she lives, Barkley Cove, everybody calls her the ‘marsh girl’. There are stories about her, making her seem unsafe and dangerous. In reality, though, Kya is a kind and smart girl. Although she never received proper schooling, she was much smarter and more knowledgeable than almost everybody in the area. Kya taught herself every subject, particularly biology, by taking lessons from the land and spending her days examining everything in the marsh. But as Kya gets older, she yearns to be loved and touched. She soon becomes interested in two boys with whom she later falls in love (at different times). One of these boys is Chase Andrews, and when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead 7 years later, Kya is the number one suspect.

The plot of this book goes by fairly slow, but I honestly never got bored or uninterested. The author is amazing at describing every single scene, and that was particularly important in this book because Kya lives in nature and has no distractions from the world around her. In a way, Kya is one with nature, and the author describes what Kya is seeing so realistically that you genuinely feel like you are there with her. The author also went back and forth on the timeline of this book, from before Chase Andrews was killed to after, and at the end of the book the two timelines come together and that is when you find out who the killer is. I really enjoyed that setup because it always kept me interested and ready to read more. I also loved how this book can be for anybody. If you like mystery and thrill, it covers that with the murder, and if you like love stories, the author takes you through Kya’s romantic life. Additionally, if you enjoy reading about nature, this book has many scenes where the author just describes the nature around Kya and her thoughts. The author did a truly wonderful job writing this book and I would really recommend it to anybody!

-Larissa