Author | Delia Owens |
---|---|
Genre | Literary fiction |
Publisher | G. P. Putnam's Sons |
Publication date | August 14, 2018 [1] |
Pages | 368 |
ISBN | 978-0-7352-1911-3 |
Where the Crawdads Sing is a 2018 coming-of-age [2] [3] murder mystery novel by American zoologist Delia Owens. [4] The story follows two timelines that slowly intertwine. The first timeline describes the life and adventures of a young girl named Kya as she grows up isolated in the marshes of North Carolina. The second timeline follows an investigation into the apparent murder of Chase Andrews, a local celebrity of Barkley Cove, a fictional coastal town of North Carolina. [1] [4] [5]
By April 2023, the book had sold over 18 million copies. A film adaptation was released in July 2022.
In 1952, six-year-old Catherine Danielle Clark (nicknamed "Kya") watches her mother abandon her and her family due to violent abuse from her husband, Kya's father. While Kya waits in vain for her mother's return, she witnesses her older siblings, Missy, Murph, Mandy, and Jodie, all leave as well, due to their father's drinking and physical abuse. After her mother leaves, her father burns most of her mother's wardrobe and paintings.
Alone with her father—who temporarily stops drinking—Kya learns to fish. Her father gives her his knapsack to hold her collections of shells and feathers. The illiterate Kya paints these shells and feathers, as well as the marsh's creatures and shorelines, with watercolors her mother left behind.
One day Kya finds a letter from her mother in the mailbox and leaves it for her father to find, as she cannot read. When she returns to their home, she finds that he has burned the letter. He returns to drinking and takes long, frequent trips away to gamble. Eventually, he does not return at all, and Kya assumes he is dead, making him the last of the family to leave her alone in the marsh. Without money and family, she survives by gardening and trading fresh mussels and smoked fish for money and gas from Jumpin', a black man who owns a gasoline station at the boat dock. Jumpin' and his wife Mabel become lifelong friends to Kya, and Mabel collects donated clothing for her.
As Kya grows up, she faces prejudice from the townspeople of Barkley Cove, North Carolina, who nickname her "The Marsh Girl." She is laughed at by the schoolchildren on the only day she goes to school and is called "nasty" and "filthy" by a pastor's wife. However, she becomes friendly with Tate Walker, an old friend of Jodie's who sometimes fishes in the marsh. When Kya loses her bearings one day, Tate leads her home in his boat. Years later, he leaves her feathers from rare birds, then teaches her how to read and write. The two form a romantic relationship until Tate leaves for college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He promises to return, yet later realizes Kya cannot live in his more civilized world because of how wild and independent she is, and leaves her without saying goodbye.
In 1965, Kya is 19. Chase Andrews, Barkley Cove's star quarterback and playboy, invites her to a picnic, during which he tries to have sex with her. He later apologizes, and the two form a romantic relationship. He shows her an abandoned fire tower, and she gives him a necklace of a shell he found during their picnic, strung on a rawhide string. Despite her suspicions, she believes Chase's promises of marriage and consummates their relationship in a cheap motel room in Asheville, North Carolina. After seeing in a newspaper that Chase has become engaged, Kya realizes his promises of marriage were a ruse. She then ends their relationship.
Tate, having graduated from college, visits Kya and attempts to apologize for having left her and confesses his love for her. Still hurt from his betrayal, she rejects him. Despite this, she allows him inside her shack, and he is impressed by her expanded collection of seashells. He urges her to publish a reference book on seashells, and she does so as well as on seabirds. With the extra money, she renovates her home. The same year, Jodie, now in the Army, also returns to Kya's life, expressing regret he left her alone and breaking the news their mother had suffered from mental illness and died of leukemia two years previously. Kya forgives her mother for leaving but still cannot understand why she never returned. After advising Kya to give Tate a second chance, Jodie sets off for Georgia, leaving Kya a note with his phone number and address.
Some time later, while relaxing in a cove, Kya is confronted by Chase. After an argument ensues, Chase attacks Kya, beating her and attempting to rape her. She fends him off and loudly threatens to kill him if he doesn't leave her alone. The encounter is witnessed by two fishermen nearby. Back at her shack, Kya fears that reporting the assault would be futile as the town would blame her for "being loose". The next week, she witnesses Chase boating up to her shack and hides until he leaves. Remembering her father's abuse, Kya fears retaliation from Chase, knowing "these men had to have the last punch".
Kya is offered a chance to meet her publisher in Greenville, North Carolina, and takes the bus there to meet him. After she returns home the next day, some young boys find Chase dead beneath the fire tower. The sheriff, Ed Jackson, believes it to be a murder on the basis of there being no tracks or fingerprints, including Chase's, around the tower. Ed speaks with sources and receives conflicting statements. He learns the shell necklace Kya gave to Chase was missing when his body was found, even though he wore it the night he died. Kya was seen leaving Barkley Cove before the murder, then returning the day after Chase died. There also were red wool fibers on Chase's jacket that belonged to a hat Tate had given to Kya. Convinced she is the culprit, Ed arrests Kya near Jumpin's wharf, charges her with first-degree murder, and jails her without bail for two months.
At Kya's trial in 1970, only contradictory and circumstantial evidence is provided. Kya's lawyer, Tom Milton, debunks the prosecutor's arguments as there was no evidence that Kya was at the fire tower on the night of Chase's death. The jury finds her not guilty. She returns home and reconciles with Tate. They live together in her shack until she dies peacefully in her boat at the age of 64. Later, while searching for Kya's will and other documents, Tate finds a hidden box with some of her old possessions and poems she had written. He finds a poem that alludes to Chase's murder, and, underneath the poems, the shell necklace Chase wore. Tate burns the poems and the rawhide string before dropping the shell onto the beach. Kya is buried on her property near the shack.
Ethology, the study of animal behavior, is a topic that is covered in the book. Kya reads about ethology, including an article titled "Sneaky Fuckers", where she learns about female fireflies, who use their coded flashing light signal to lure a male of another species to his death, and about female mantises who lure a male mate and start eating the mate's head and thorax while his abdomen is still copulating with her. [6]
Female fireflies draw in strange males with dishonest signals and eat them; mantis females devour their own mates. Female insects, Kya thought, know how to deal with their lovers. [7] : 274
Crawdad is an American slang word for crayfish: these crustaceans cannot sing, but when Kya's mother encouraged her to explore the marsh, she would often say: "Go as far as you can — way out yonder where the crawdads sing." When Tate also used the phrase, she asked him the meaning and he replied: "Just means far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters." Owens's mother had used the phrase when she was a child. [8]
The book was selected for Reese Witherspoon's book club in September 2018 [9] and for Barnes & Noble's Best Books of 2018. [10]
By December 2019, the book had sold over 4.5 million copies, and it sold more print copies in 2019 than any other adult title, fiction or non-fiction. [11] [12] It topped The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2019 and The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2020. [13] [14] By February 2022, the book had spent 150 weeks on the best seller list. [15] By April 2022, the book had sold 12 million copies; [16] by July 2022, 15 million copies; [17] and by April 2023, 18 million copies, [18] making it one of the best-selling books of all time. [19] [20] [21] [22]
Since "crawdad" is a regional term, it sparked a rise in online queries about the word's meaning. [23]
Aspects of Kya's life and the novel's narrative choices, including its attitude towards its black characters, are said to be reminiscent of Owens's time in Zambia, where she, her then husband, and his son are still wanted for questioning in the killing of a poacher captured on film in a 1996 report by ABC News. Owens is not a suspect, but is considered a possible witness, co-conspirator or accessory. [24]
Sony Pictures Releasing bought the film rights to the book, and Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine production company produced the film, with Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter as co-producers. Lucy Alibar adapted the book to film script. [25] [26] [27] Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kya, [28] with Taylor John Smith and Harris Dickinson as Tate Walker and Chase Andrews, respectively. [15] Filming took place from mid-April through mid/late-June 2021 in and around New Orleans and Houma, Louisiana. [29] On July 5, 2021, Cosmopolitan reported that filming had wrapped. [30] The film was released on July 15, 2022.
The soundtrack album is by Canadian composer Mychael Danna. [31] Taylor Swift also contributed an original song, "Carolina", to the soundtrack. [32]
Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon is an American actress and producer. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and two Golden Globe Awards. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2006 and 2015, and Forbes listed her among the world's 100 most powerful women in 2019 and 2021. In 2021, Forbes named her the world's highest earning actress, and in 2023, she was named one of the richest women in America with an estimated net worth of $440 million.
Cheryl Strayed is an American writer and podcast host. She has written four books: the novel Torch (2006) and the nonfiction books Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Tiny Beautiful Things (2012) and Brave Enough (2015). Wild, the story of Strayed's 1995 hike up the Pacific Crest Trail, is an international bestseller and was adapted into the 2014 Academy Award-nominated film Wild.
Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai, also known by the initialism YRKKH, is an Indian Hindi-language romantic family drama television series that airs on StarPlus and streams on Disney+ Hotstar. It premiered on 12 January 2009 and is the longest running Indian television soap opera. The series is produced by Rajan Shahi under Director's Kut Productions. It has previously starred Hina Khan, Karan Mehra, Shivangi Joshi, Mohsin Khan, Pranali Rathod, Harshad Chopda, and Shehzada Dhami. Currently, it stars Samridhii Shukla and Rohit Purohit.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is the 2012 memoir by the American writer, author, and podcaster Cheryl Strayed. The memoir describes Strayed's 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995 as a journey of self-discovery. The book reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.
Colleen Hoover is an American author who primarily writes novels in the romance and young adult fiction genres. She is best known for her 2016 romance novel It Ends with Us. Many of her works were self-published before being picked up by a publishing house. As of October 2022, Hoover has sold approximately 20 million books. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Alice Ravenel Huger Smith was an American painter and printmaker. She was one of the leading figures in the so-called Charleston Renaissance, along with Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, Alfred Hutty, and Anna Heyward Taylor.
Taylor John Smith is an American actor. He is known for his role as John Keene in the series Sharp Objects. Notable films in which he has appeared are Wolves (2016), You Get Me (2017), Hunter Killer (2018), The Outpost (2020), Shadow in the Cloud (2020), and Where the Crawdads Sing (2022).
Harris Dickinson is an English actor. He began his career in British television and had his first starring role in the drama film Beach Rats (2017), for which he was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead. He played John Paul Getty III in the FX drama series Trust (2018).
Biology appears in fiction, especially but not only in science fiction, both in the shape of real aspects of the science, used as themes or plot devices, and in the form of fictional elements, whether fictional extensions or applications of biological theory, or through the invention of fictional organisms. Major aspects of biology found in fiction include evolution, disease, genetics, physiology, parasitism and symbiosis (mutualism), ethology, and ecology.
Delia Owens is an American author, zoologist, and conservationist. She is best known for her 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing.
Daisy Jessica Edgar-Jones is a British actress. She began her career with the television series Cold Feet (2016–2020) and War of the Worlds (2019–2021). She gained recognition for her starring role in the miniseries Normal People (2020), which earned her nominations for a British Academy Television Award and a Golden Globe Award.
Olivia Newman is an American film director and screenwriter. She is best known for directing First Match (2018) and Where the Crawdads Sing (2022).
Where the Crawdads Sing is a 2022 American mystery drama film directed by Olivia Newman from a screenplay by Lucy Alibar, based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Delia Owens. The film stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer Jr., Jojo Regina, Garret Dillahunt, Ahna O'Reilly, and David Strathairn. The story follows an abandoned yet defiant girl, Kya (Edgar-Jones), who raises herself to adulthood in a North Carolina marshland, becoming a naturalist in the process. When the town's hotshot is found dead, she is the prime suspect and is tried for murder.
The Last Thing He Told Me is a mystery-thriller novel written by Laura Dave, published May 4, 2021 by Simon & Schuster. The book became an instant #1 New York Times Bestseller and spent 82 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list.
"Carolina" is a song written and recorded by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift for the soundtrack of the 2022 murder mystery film Where the Crawdads Sing. Released via Republic Records on June 24, 2022, the song is titled after the Carolinas region in the United States, and sung from the perspective of the film's protagonist, Kya. "Carolina" was met with strong acclaim from music critics, most of whom felt the song's ambience matched the film's atmosphere, and is reminiscent of Swift's 2020 indie folk albums, Folklore and Evermore. Reviews commended the song for Swift's vocals, songwriting style, and the overall "haunting" mood.
Fairy Tale is a dark fantasy novel by American author Stephen King, published on September 6, 2022, by Scribner. The novel follows Charlie Reade, a 17-year-old who inherits keys to a hidden, otherworldly realm, and finds himself leading the battle between forces of good and evil.
Where the Crawdads Sing (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the soundtrack to the 2022 film of the same name released on July 15, 2022 by Mercury Classics. It features the original score composed by Canadian composer Mychael Danna, and an original song "Carolina" written and performed by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. According to Danna, the score's "unique instrumentation creates haunting melodies that are directly inspired by the North Carolina marshlands, and meticulously crafted to foster an almost fable-like sense of time and place".
This is a list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 2020s, as determined by Publishers Weekly. The list features the most popular novels of each year from 2020 through to 2029.
Reese's Book Club is a celebrity book sales club run by Reese Witherspoon under her media company Hello Sunshine. Since its founding in 2017, the club has gained a reputation for boosting the careers of female authors such as Delia Owens, Celeste Ng, and Megan Miranda.
Cassandra Campbell is an American narrator of over 900 audiobooks. She has won four Audie Awards from the Audio Publishers Association and has been a finalist for several more. She has also earned numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile, who named her a Golden Voice Narrator. In 2018, she was inducted into Audible’s Narrator Hall of Fame.