Book Review: Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens has topped The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2019 for 27 non-consecutive weeks. This impressive statistic shows truly how great of a story Owens takes the reader through. 

Where the Crawdads Sing follows a young, independent girl named Kya on her journey through life. The book is broken up into two timelines following her growth. The first timeline describes the life and adventures of a young girl named Kya as she grows up isolated in the marsh of North Carolina after her mother leaves. The second timeline follows a murder investigation of Chase Andrews, a local celebrity of Barkley Cove, a fictional coastal town of North Carolina. 

This book gained popularity when Reese Witherspoon added it to her Hello Sunshine Book Club in September 2018. By December 2019, the book has sold over 4.5 million copies, and it has sold more print copies in 2019 than any other adult title, fiction or nonfiction. It was also No. 1 for 2019 on Amazon.com’s list of Most Sold Books in fiction. Owen’s bestseller is comparable to Tara Westover’s book Educated. Both stories follow two female dominate overcoming their past for a better future. Both books have conspiracies over if the authors actually lived these events, which have boosted the book’s popularity even more. 

Delia Owens is from Georgia and vacationed in the marshes of North Carolina as a child, hence where the setting over the book was cultivated. She went on to pursue science and animal behavioral studies, a lot like Kya, Owens felt a connection to nature. Owens and her ex-husband moved their lives to Africa to protect and study animals. While there they wrote 3 books about Africa and were part of a murder conspiracy of a poacher. The conspiracies about Where the Crawdads Sing come from coincidental parallels from Owen’s past and Kya’s story. 

Follow the adventures of a young girl who has dealt with the loss of a mother and the effects of addiction and love. This inspiring, love and mystery novel will keep readers on the edge of their seats, never knowing what will come next. 

Who really killed Chase Andrews? Will Kya be defined by her troubled family? Will she ever find true love? Figure this all out and more in Where the Crawdads Sing.