Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing

By: Delia Owens

I haven’t read many coming of age novels, but Where the Crawdads Sing was the pick for our book club for May and I had no idea what I was getting myself into.  Your heart goes out to the main character Kya right from the beginning.  Her family in disarray, her living conditions also completely pitiful but this story doesn’t focus on that.  Rather it talks about resilience.  The need to keep going to live, to thrive.  A young girl growing into adult hood and not by the help of her mother or sisters or aunts, but by nature.  You find everything from gulls to lightening bugs, fishing and digging for mussels.  The reader truly feels enveloped by the marsh and its inhabitants throughout this story. 

Kya goes on one emotional ride after the other and you can’t help but stay with her through her journeys of isolation.  How can one young person be so isolated but still have so much love in their heart?  We meet Tate early on and though we initially love him, he all people, makes his own mistakes.  I found it hard to forgive him but in the end found no other alternative.  Chase Andrews was the other guy we meet in this story, and I feel that we all have met a real life Chase at one time or another.  I absolutely hated him from the beginning to the end but loved that he was a character in this story because it needed him.  Our lives need a Chase Andrews so we can learn from them.  Most of us don’t find a perfect romance in the first love of our lives and instead we must be dealt a broken heart and learn how to put the pieces back together again and do our best to move on. 

So many other side characters in this novel, made this story so heartwarming and gut-wrenching all at the same time. Jumpin’ and Mabel are protectors I think we all wish we could have had and I don’t think I realized just how big Jumpin’s impact on Kya was until later in the story.  With touches on abandonment, isolation, survival, science, and love, Where the Crawdads Sing touched my heart in many different ways, with Kya taking a little piece of my heart along the way.