This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
Kya only knows life out in the marsh. She is the youngest of five children, but she doesn’t really remember the older three because they all wandered off when they could, to escape their abusive, alcoholic father. Then her mother leaves one day, and then the brother she knows the best. And after a few years, her father’s days-long jaunts away turn into him just being gone. The young girl must survive largely on her own, aided here and there by a few souls who keep an eye out for her. To almost all the people in town, though, she just becomes known as the “Marsh Girl.” As hard as she has to work to survive, Kya doesn’t want to leave her home because she loves the natural world all around her: the teeming life of all that makes up the ecosystem of the marsh.
A decade or more after she’s left on her own, a man in town is found dead at the base of an observation tower in a section of the marsh. Chase Andrews in his prime, the town’s golden boy. And people want justice. Since he had been seen going out to the marsh to “slum” with the Marsh Girl, she is a natural target of suspicion. But there are no tracks around the tower, no sure indication there was a crime.
Kya likely would have been mostly free from suspicion if she just hadn’t opened herself up to love. She fell for the kind Tate Walker, who fished in the waters near her and looked out for her for years. He slowly befriended her, making contact and then visiting with her permission, and he taught her to read and write and to do math, and he brought her books. But when he left for college, she felt the acute pain of loneliness, a crack where the wandering-eyed Chase could find a way in.
Told over the course of about two decades, Where the Crawdads Sing is partly a murder mystery and partly a tale of one young woman having to navigate life with very little in the way of love. But the connections she does make as she allows people in are so sweet, and it’s heartwarming to see the good in people even as there are others who are various shades of not-as-good to her. The book is just as much about nature and the complex ecosystem as it is about Kya and the tenderness of her story, and it shows that the author is a wildlife scientist. It’s beautiful all around.
Rated: Moderate. There are three uses of strong language and occasional uses of moderate language. Sexual content includes three or four scenes that are moderately detailed. There is a rape attempt. There is a murder (and it’s a mystery who the perpetrator is), but the actual murder doesn’t happen “on-screen.” There are references to domestic violence but only two or three scenes actually include it, and it’s fairly brief.
Click here to grab your copy of Where the Crawdads Sing on Amazon.
