Where the Crawdads Sing: Strength in the Face of Loneliness

I’m a strong believer that some books just come to you precisely when you need them. This is exactly what happened for me with Where The Crawdads Sing. I’d been aware of the novel’s popularity for a while, but only on the periphery of my consciousness: 2019 was a busy year for me, and London life never seemed to afford much time for reading anyway. 2020 however, promised to be better – as I stacked my Kindle (figuratively speaking) full of all the books that I had been ‘meaning to read for ages’ – including Crawdads – in preparation for our once-in-a-lifetime trip backpacking around Australia and New Zealand. It remained untouched however, as we spent a blissful couple of months exploring New Zealand in our campervan Bobbie, and even during the shock of the initial lockdown (despite me reading voraciously during this time). It wasn’t until later, when I was going through a delayed-onset ‘truly-what-the-f-has-happened?’ moment that I finally remembered this little gem of a book waiting to be opened.

June 2020, and I found myself tucked away from the world in New Zealand’s remote Lewis Pass – both a blessing (safely far-removed from the worst of the pandemic) but also a shock (the decision to stay in New Zealand, realising that I might not see my family at home in Scotland for much longer than I’d anticipated, the post-lockdown bite on my finances, the fact that my partner was now living a two-hour drive away as we’d found jobs in different places…). Perhaps it was the anti-social hours I was working (being a chef means early mornings and late evenings), the encroaching South Island winter, the fact that the darkness crept over our mountain-edged valley earlier and earlier each evening, or the solitude of being so cut off from the rest of the world – but I finally picked up the book that had been nudging at the edge of my consciousness for so long. And it turned out, in all its dazzling page-turning beauty, to be exactly what my mind needed at the time.

About the book

One by one, Kya’s family slowly leave, abandoning her in their small shack just outside of Barkley Cove, a quiet coastal town in North Carolina. Alone, growing up in the wilds of North Carolina’s marshlands, Kya becomes known as the “Marsh Girl”, shunned by the locals and the butt of ignorant, sometimes cruel jokes. To them she is nothing but “po-white” trash – looked down on by the 1969 white residents of Barkley Cove almost as much as they did the residents of Colored Town. Isolated from her kind, Kya draws on the nature around her as her teacher, learning how to camouflage herself, foraging for food and digging up mussels to sell in town.

As the narrative weaves back and forth throughout Kya’s life, describing how she could find her way home by the stars and knew every feather of an eagle, the beauty of the imagery is gradually offset by an uncomfortable feeling tugging at the edges of your mind: all is not right. You can’t help but remember that the story started with a dead body face-up in the mud. Eventually the novel comes to a head when Kya is accused of murdering popular local rich-kid and former-high school quarterback Chase Andrews, and the balance of Kya’s world is held in the hands of twelve jury members of the very community who so ostracised her.

Part coming of age story, part murder mystery, Where The Crawdads Sing will have you hooked until the very last page.