Book Review: Where the Crawdads Sing

Here's my little book review on Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

I know this book has been around a while but I just recently saw it on sale at Albertson's when I was grocery shopping and bought it.  I finished it a few days ago.

Wow.  It's so good.  This is the author's first book of fiction. That in itself is impressive because I thought it was so well-written.  The story is set in the 1950's and 1960's in the marshlands of North Carolina.  The main character is a young girl named Kya.  She is left to fend for herself in a shack by the marsh.

At first she struggles but eventually finds a way to make it on her own.  She has a wonderful mind, sensitive spirit and feeling for the land and all its animals.  She figures out how to collect mussels and catch fish and sell them as well as grow her own garden to survive.  Her best friends are the sea gulls.

But even with her deep connection to nature and all her animal friends, she is very lonely. Eventually an older man who sells bait and gas befriends her.  She also meets and becomes romantically entangled with two young men from the nearby small town. But through it all she remains an outcast to the people in town who call her The Marsh Girl.

There is a murder mystery woven through the story, too, which really kept me turning the pages.  

I would highly recommend this book.  It's beautifully written, very emotional, and has wonderful descriptions of the lush and mysterious marshlands.  I give it 5 out of 5 stars.

Here is a passage from the book:

"Months passed, winter easing gently into place, as southern winters do. The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya's shoulders, coaxing her deeper into the marsh.  Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn't know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her.  Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand.  Still there, but deep.  Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother."