where the crawdads sing book review npr

Questions linger over 'Where the Crawdads Sing' author as film adaptation is released

Where the Crawdads Sing tells the fictional story of Kya, a girl left to raise herself along a North Carolina bayou in the 1950s and 60s. "The marsh girl," as she's known, is reviled and shunned by those in the nearby town. In time, Kya is put on trial for murder. Now, there's a film adapted from the novel by an author with a mysterious past.

It took wildlife scientist Delia Owens a decade to write Where the Crawdads Sing. Her first novel has now been on the New York Times best seller list for 168 weeks (most of that time at the top). Actress Reese Witherspoon loved it so much, she added it to her popular book club and produced the new film adaptation.

"It just blew me away," Witherspoon told CBS Sunday Morning . "It felt like when I was reading To Kill A Mockingbird or just any sort of classic Southern literature. She layers on this thriller element, there's a murder ..."

And murder — a real life murder in the mid 1990s — is the big elephant in the room. With the film's release, news has resurfaced that 73-year-old Owens is still wanted for questioning by Zambian authorities as a possible witness, co- conspirator and accessory to federal crimes . At the time, she and her then-husband Mark were living in Zambia as animal conservationists, trying to save elephants from poachers.

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg first wrote about this for The New Yorker in 2010, and more recently, The Atlantic magazine, where he's now editor in chief. His reporting suggests the Owens set up a brutal operation to go after anyone who was a threat to the elephant reserve. In fact, an ABC news crew documenting the Owens's work in 1995 actually captured the execution of a suspected poacher.

"The bodies of the poachers are often left where they fall, for the animals to eat," narrator Meredith Viera said on the show Turning Point. "Conservation. Morality. Africa."

You can hear the gunshots, but the shooter of the unidentified man was never seen on camera, a body was never found, and no one has been formally charged with a crime. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, some witnesses reportedly implicated Mark Owens and his son Christopher. But the journalist says their attorneys have issued statements of denial in the killing. He quoted Delia Owens saying she had nothing to do with it.

For months, the movie's publicists have told me the author is not available to comment. So the news continues to hang over the film like Spanish moss over a murky bayou.

Taylor Swift wrote and sang on the film's soundtrack , saying on Instagram, she wanted "to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story." But she's faced social media backlash for her involvement in the film. In an interview, the director and star of the movie both told me they didn't know anything about this part of Delia Owens' past, though they did say she has a cameo in the film.

Instead, they talked up how the isolation and resilience of Where the Crawdads Sing resonated with readers, especially when the coronavirus pandemic left many feeling alone.

"There's this great murder mystery that keeps you turning the pages," director Olivia Newman said. "There's this survivalist tale and this observation of nature which is so gorgeously articulated by a scientist. There's this epic romance that provides a certain escape from some of the harsher realities of our lives And so I think especially during a pandemic it was so wonderful to be immersed in that world and that was the hope for the movie. That was the hope for the movie was to create that same sort of world that you didn't want to leave."

British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones , who plays Kya in the film, said she met with author Delia Owens when they shot on location in the marshlands around New Orleans.

"To actually film in these amazing sort of bayous and marshes with the Spanish moss and the sound of cicadas, oh, it was just absolutely magical," she said. "We had crazy thunder and lightening storms, and at one point the set flooded. We had alligators along the banks and snake wranglers. And it was just like it had been taken from my imagination."

Edgar-Jones says Delia Owens encouraged her to enjoy herself in portraying the main character.

"Kya's a very complex character," she said. "She is very sort of strong and and resilient. But she's also a very curious and gentle creature. And I think that kind of mixture of things was something I found very interesting about her, because she's complicated like so many of us are."

Early reviews of Where the Crawdads Sing have been mixed . It remains to be seen whether questions about the author will overshadow the film.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING

by Delia Owens ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 14, 2018

Despite some distractions, there’s an irresistible charm to Owens’ first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.

A wild child’s isolated, dirt-poor upbringing in a Southern coastal wilderness fails to shield her from heartbreak or an accusation of murder.

“The Marsh Girl,” “swamp trash”—Catherine “Kya” Clark is a figure of mystery and prejudice in the remote North Carolina coastal community of Barkley Cove in the 1950s and '60s. Abandoned by a mother no longer able to endure her drunken husband’s beatings and then by her four siblings, Kya grows up in the careless, sometimes-savage company of her father, who eventually disappears, too. Alone, virtually or actually, from age 6, Kya learns both to be self-sufficient and to find solace and company in her fertile natural surroundings. Owens ( Secrets of the Savanna , 2006, etc.), the accomplished co-author of several nonfiction books on wildlife, is at her best reflecting Kya’s fascination with the birds, insects, dappled light, and shifting tides of the marshes. The girl’s collections of shells and feathers, her communion with the gulls, her exploration of the wetlands are evoked in lyrical phrasing which only occasionally tips into excess. But as the child turns teenager and is befriended by local boy Tate Walker, who teaches her to read, the novel settles into a less magical, more predictable pattern. Interspersed with Kya’s coming-of-age is the 1969 murder investigation arising from the discovery of a man’s body in the marsh. The victim is Chase Andrews, “star quarterback and town hot shot,” who was once Kya’s lover. In the eyes of a pair of semicomic local police officers, Kya will eventually become the chief suspect and must stand trial. By now the novel’s weaknesses have become apparent: the monochromatic characterization (good boy Tate, bad boy Chase) and implausibilities (Kya evolves into a polymath—a published writer, artist, and poet), yet the closing twist is perhaps its most memorable oddity.

Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-7352-1909-0

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018

LITERARY FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

BOOK TO SCREEN

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

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Review: 'Where the Crawdads Sing' falls short of the book's magic

At the end of "Where the Crawdads Sing," the film version of the runaway 2018 Delia Owens bestseller, Taylor Swift captures in song the haunting, folklore quality of the story about a young girl forced to raise herself in the North Carolina marshes, who later goes on trial for murdering the boy she thought she loved.

What a shame that this two-hour movie never matches the bruising beauty that Swift distills into that four-minute song. The guiding principle behind the film seems to be: Don't mess with a novel that's been on the New York Times bestseller list for 150 weeks.

Despite a stellar female creative team -- producer Reese Witherspoon, director Olivia Newman ("First Match") and screenwriter Lucy Alibar ("Beasts of the Southern Wild") -- the film takes so few risks with this publishing phenom that it feels more embalmed than freshly imagined.

Readers of the 2018 novel -- which has sold 12 million copies and counting -- probably won't be bothered by the richer options left unexplored. There's a flow to the movie that speeds you along even when you yearn for it to stop churning and dig deeper into the characters.

At first, English actress Daisy Edgar-Jones (so fine in "Normal People") seems an odd choice for Kya Clark, the "Marsh Girl" who remains an outlier except to Tom Milton (the reliably superb David Strathairn), the old-school southern lawyer who defends her at her 1969 murder trial.

Edgar-Jones grows into the role of an enigma that the film tries to clear up through clumsy flashbacks. As a child in the 1950s, young Kya (a livewire Jojo Regina) is shown being abandoned by her mother (Ahna O'Reilly) and siblings and left at the mercy of her drunken, abusive father (Garret Dillahunt) until even he goes missing.

Related Articles

MORE: Review: 'Anatomy of a Scandal' features exhilirating performances

It's the nurturing wildlife that eases Kya's loneliness as she paints watercolors (later published) of the flora and fauna and finds comfort with Black shopkeepers Jumpin (Sterling Macer Jr.) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt) who help feed and clothe her.

The racial angle is perfunctory at best. And though cinematographer Polly Morgan creates pretty pictures, they're no match for the nature writing that gave a touch of the poet to the book by Owens, a retired zoologist who was 69 when her novel debuted four years ago.

On screen, a tidied-up Kya is far from the feral creature Owens created. And the film pushes way too hard at the love triangle that links Kya with sweet Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), who deserts her to attend college, and bad boy Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), whose hotness hides secrets that continue Kya's cycle of abuse.

That leaves the actors struggling to give cardboard cutouts the heft of flesh-and-blood people. Edgar-Jones has the skill to show how isolation defines Kya's character, but the film is always hustling her into overcrowded plot corners.

MORE: This is Going to Hurt keeps you riveted from first scene to last: Review

The whodunit twist relating to Chase's murder still packs a wallop but at the expense of investigating themes that made the book stick in the memory despite its drift into soap opera. You have to return to the lyrics by Taylor Swift to find the heart of Kya's story:

"I make a fist / I make it count / And there are places I will never ever go / And things that only Carolina will ever know."

Swift's words and music for "Carolina" suggest an abiding mystery that's missing from the big-screen "Where the Crawdads Sing." Fleeting traces of the book's magic only add to the frustration of watching a facsimile trying to pass itself off as the real thing.

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Where the Crawdads Sing

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Watch Where the Crawdads Sing with a subscription on Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

Daisy Edgar-Jones gives it her all, but Where the Crawdads Sing is ultimately unable to distill its source material into a tonally coherent drama.

A particular treat for viewers who love the book, Where the Crawdads Sing offers a faithfully told, well-acted story in a rich, beautifully filmed setting.

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Olivia Newman

Daisy Edgar-Jones

Taylor John Smith

Tate Walker

Harris Dickinson

Chase Andrews

Garret Dillahunt

Michael Hyatt

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The cicadas buzz and the moss drips and the sunset casts a golden shimmer on the water every single evening. But while “Where the Crawdads Sing” is rich in atmosphere, it’s sorely lacking in actual substance or suspense.

Maybe it was an impossible task, taking the best-selling source material and turning it into a cinematic experience that would please both devotees and newbies alike. Delia Owens ’ novel became a phenomenon in part as a Reese Witherspoon book club selection; Witherspoon is a producer on “Where the Crawdads Sing,” and Taylor Swift wrote and performs the theme song, adding to the expectation surrounding the film’s arrival.

But the result of its pulpy premise is a movie that’s surprisingly inert. Director Olivia Newman , working from a script by Lucy Alibar , jumps back and forth without much momentum between a young woman’s murder trial and the recollections of her rough-and-tumble childhood in 1950s and ‘60s North Carolina. (Alibar also wrote “ Beasts of the Southern Wild ,” which “Where the Crawdads Sing” resembles somewhat as a story of a resourceful little girl’s survival within a squalid, swampy setting.)  

It is so loaded with plot that it ends up feeling superficial, rendering major revelations as rushed afterthoughts. For a film about a brave woman who’s grown up in the wild, living by her own rules, “Where the Crawdads Sing” is unusually tepid and restrained. And aside from Daisy Edgar-Jones ’ multi-layered performance as its central figure, the characters never evolve beyond a basic trait or two.

We begin in October 1969 in the marshes of fictional Barkley Cove, North Carolina, where a couple of boys stumble upon a dead body lying in the muck. It turns out to be Chase Andrews, a popular big fish in this insular small pond. And Edgar-Jones’ Kya, with whom he’d once had an unlikely romantic entanglement, becomes the prime suspect. She’s an easy target, having long been ostracized and vilified as The Marsh Girl—or when townsfolk are feeling particularly derisive toward her, That Marsh Girl. Flashbacks reveal the abuse she and her family suffered at the hands of her volatile, alcoholic father ( Garret Dillahunt , harrowing in just a few scenes), and the subsequent abandonment she endured as everyone left her, one by one, to fend for herself—starting with her mother. These vivid, early sections are the most emotionally powerful, with Jojo Regina giving an impressive, demanding performance in her first major film role as eight-year-old Kya.

As she grows into her teens and early 20s and Edgar-Jones takes over, two very different young men shape her formative years. There’s the too-good-to-be-true Tate (Taylor John Smith ), a childhood friend who teaches her to read and write and becomes her first love. (“There was something about that boy that eased the tautness in my chest,” Kya narrates, one of many clunky examples of transferring Owens’ words from page to screen.) And later, there’s the arrogant and bullying Chase ( Harris Dickinson ), who’s obviously bad news from the start, something the reclusive Kya is unable to recognize.

But what she lacks in emotional maturity, she makes up for in curiosity about the natural world around her, and she becomes a gifted artist and autodidact. Edgar-Jones embodies Kya’s raw impulses while also subtly registering her apprehension and mistrust. Pretty much everyone lets her down and underestimates her, except for the kindly Black couple who run the local convenience store and serve as makeshift parents (Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt , bringing much-needed warmth, even though there’s not much to their characters). David Strathairn gets the least to work with in one of the film’s most crucial roles as Kya’s attorney: a sympathetic, Atticus Finch type who comes out of retirement to represent her.

This becomes especially obvious in the film’s courtroom scenes, which are universally perfunctory and offer only the blandest cliches and expected dramatic beats. Every time “Where the Crawdads Sing” cuts back to Kya’s murder trial—which happens seemingly out of nowhere, with no discernible rhythm or reason—the pacing drags and you’ll wish you were back in the sun-dappled marshes, investigating its many creatures. ( Polly Morgan provides the pleasing cinematography.)

What actually ends up happening here, though, is such a terrible twist—and it all plays out in such dizzyingly speedy fashion—that it’s unintentionally laughable. You get the sensation that everyone involved felt the need to cram it all in, yet still maintain a manageable running time. If you’ve read the book, you know what happened to Chase Andrews; if you haven’t, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it here. But I will say I had a variety of far more intriguing conclusions swirling around in my head in the car ride home, and you probably will, too. 

Now playing in theaters.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)

Rated PG-13 for sexual content and some violence including a sexual assault.

125 minutes

Daisy Edgar-Jones as Catherine 'Kya' Clark

Taylor John Smith as Tate Walker

Harris Dickinson as Chase Andrews

Michael Hyatt as Mabel

Sterling MacEr Jr. as Jumpin'

David Strathairn as Tom Milton

Garret Dillahunt as Pa

Eric Ladin as Eric Chastain

Ahna O'Reilly as Ma

Jojo Regina as Young Kya

• Olivia Newman

Writer (based upon the novel by)

• Delia Owens
• Lucy Alibar

Cinematographer

• Polly Morgan
• Alan Edward Bell
• Mychael Danna

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Review: ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is the latest literary sensation turned ho-hum movie

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In 2018, retired zoologist Delia Owens, the author of the bestselling 1984 memoir “Cry of the Kalahari,” published her first novel at the age of 69. “Where the Crawdads Sing” is set on the North Carolina coast in the 1950s and ’60s, threading romance and murder mystery through the life story of a young, isolated woman, Kya, who grows up abandoned in the marsh. The story is a bit far-fetched, the characterizations broad, but there’s a beauty in Owens’ description of Kya’s relationship to the natural world. Her derisive nickname, “the Marsh Girl,” ultimately becomes her strength.

“Where the Crawdads Sing” has become a legitimate publishing phenomenon, one of the bestselling books of all time, despite a controversy bubbling in Owens’ past — a connection to the killing of a suspected animal poacher in Zambia. Reese Witherspoon bestowed the book with her book club blessing, and as she has done with other titles from her club, like “Big Little Lies,” Witherspoon has produced the film adaptation of “Where the Crawdads Sing,” written by Lucy Alibar, directed by Olivia Newman, and starring Daisy Edgar-Jones as the heroine, Kya.

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The film is easily slotted into the Southern gothic courtroom drama sub-genre — it’s like “A Time to Kill” with a feminine touch. While the nature of adaptation requires compression and elision, the film dutifully tells the story that fans of the book will turn out to see brought to life on the big screen. But in checking off all the plot points, the movie version loses what makes the book work, which is the time we spend with Kya.

Kya is a tricky protagonist whose life story requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Abandoned by her mother (Ahna O’Reilly) and siblings escaping the drunken abuse of her father (Garret Dillahunt), who later disappears, young Kya (Jojo Regina) survives on her own, selling mussels to the proprietor of the local bait and tackle shop, Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jr.). His wife, Mabel (Michael Hyatt), takes pity on Kya and offers her some clothes and food donations, but it’s an exceedingly tough existence, something that the film does not manage to fully convey.

As a teen, Kya forms a friendship with a local boy, Tate (Taylor John Smith), who teaches her to read, and though their relationship turns romantic, he ultimately leaves her for college. Abandoned once again, she seeks companionship with popular local cad Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson). It’s his death, from a fall at the rickety fire tower, that sees Kya on trial in the town of Barkley Cove, which ultimately becomes a referendum on how she’s been harshly judged over the years by the townspeople.

The only reason Kya works in the book is the amount of time the reader spends with her in the marsh, understanding the tactics she uses to get by, and getting to know the natural world in the way that she does, observing the patterns and life cycles of animals, insects, and plants. The deep knowledge of her environment and ad-hoc education from Tate helps Kya overcome poverty, as she publishes illustrated books of local shells, plants, and birds. But in the film, which sacrifices getting to know her in order to prioritize the more scandal-driven twists and turns, Kya comes off as somewhat silly, a bit easy to laugh at in her naiveté and guilelessness.

There’s also the matter of plausibility, and the shininess with which this rough, wild world has been rendered by Newman and cinematographer Polly Morgan. The marsh (shot on location in Louisiana) is captured with a crisp, if perfunctory beauty, but it’s hard to buy English rose Edgar-Jones in her crisp blouses and clean jeans as the near-feral naturalist who has been brutally cast out by society. Everything’s just too pretty, a Disneyland version of the marsh.

The whole world feels sanded-down and spit-shined within an inch of its life, lacking any grime or grit that might make this feel authentic, and that extends to the storytelling as well. It feels exceedingly rushed, as the actors hit their marks and deliver their monologues with a sense of obligation to moving the plot along rather than developing character. Hyatt, as Mabel, and David Strathairn, who plays Kya’s lawyer, Tom Milton, are the only actors who deliver grounded performances that feel like real people — everyone else feels like a two-dimensional version of an archetype spouting the necessary backstory or subtext to keep the plot churning forward.

Though it is faithful, “Where the Crawdads Sing” is lacking the essential character and storytelling connective tissue that makes a story like this work — an adaptation such as this cannot survive on plot alone.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

'Where the Crawdads Sing'

Rating: PG-13, for sexual content and some violence including a sexual assault Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes Playing: In general release July 15

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Three cheers for actress and producer Reese Witherspoon, founder of the wildly popular Reese’s Book Club. Since it was launched in 2017, inclusion has secured all manner of novels a readership, and given many writers a profile. The conclusion is clear: Witherspoon is good for books.

Sadly she may also be bad for films, at least to judge by the twee and clumsy Where the Crawdads Sing . Delia Owens’s debut novel was the book club’s biggest smash: a wrenching tale of nature and justice in the 1960s American South, propelled into selling an eye-popping 12mn copies. That size of audience was never going to be left hanging for long, and in her role as producer, Witherspoon now presents this botched adaptation, opening with the body of a small-town alpha male who has plunged to his death in coastal marshland. (There was evidently no soft landing.)

To Kill a Mockingbird is the obvious touchstone, the suspect revealed as a mash-up of Harper Lee’s recluse Boo Radley and the unjustly accused Tom Robinson. Qualities of each are now wrapped up in one young woman, a gentle soul named Kya (played by Londoner Daisy Edgar-Jones). But to others she is simply “Marsh Girl” — an outsider in a remote North Carolina bayou, cruelly scorned by nearby townspeople.

Early in the film, we meet her as a girl, her penniless family absconding one by one rather than stay with the violent, alcoholic father. But soon he leaves too. Alone, she becomes expert in and skilled painter of the marsh flora and fauna, being taught to read and write by a kindly local boy. (The black owners of the local grocery store are her only other friends; the story’s racial politics might best be called polite.) Next stop: a book deal with a New York publisher. But no! Here comes the murder trial.

Of course, even the most accomplished stories sound trite pared down to bare plot points. Part of the problem with the film is it does exactly that itself. The movie has the jerky, inattentive rhythm of skim-reading. Director Olivia Newman doesn’t hurry or over-compress — she just spends two hours prettily framing Edgar-Jones (charismatic, if never quite shaking off Muswell Hill) while writer Lucy Alibar wheels paper-thin supporting characters into unearned head-spinner twists. Everything feels both fussy and perfunctory, and not a bit of it real.

A book lover like Witherspoon should be delighted. The movie makes a great case for the written word.

In US cinemas now and UK cinemas from July 22

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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens review – in the swamps of North Carolina

This lush debut about an isolated girl who finds education and solace in nature is already a US bestseller

I n screen dramas, during a scene of sex or violence in a living room, the camera will often slyly reveal that a David Attenborough wildlife documentary is playing unwatched in the corner. The naturalist’s whispered observations about the tactics of the “male” or “female” comment ironically or ominously on the human interactions.

That trope is spectacularly extended in Where the Crawdads Sing , the debut novel by Delia Owens, an American wildlife scientist. It lands in Britain boosted by the cherished trinity of New York Times bestsellerdom, a frenzied foreign sales fight, and a film in development by Reese Witherspoon (her online book club picked the novel in September 2018).

The main storyline spans – in a date-jumbling, tension-building order –1952 to 1970, following Kya Clark between the ages of six and 25 as she grows up alone in a shack in the swamplands of North Carolina after being abandoned by her family. She learns from the wildlife around her, gaining tricks of camouflage to evade truant officers and acquiring hunting skills to feed herself and catch mussels and fish to sell to shopkeepers in the town beyond the creek.

As a human who knows only nature, all Kya’s reference points come from her surroundings – and her creator’s day job. Her observation that mother animals and birds always return to their young leads her poignantly to believe that her childhood solitude will be temporary. When, as a teenager, she starts to attract attention from two townie boys, kind working-class Tate and arrogant posh boy Chase, her dating rituals are drawn from observing the sex life of fireflies. She also, crucially, observes the dangers of predation in the wild.

Among the many modern phenomena of which isolated Kya has no inkling is the vast popularity of crime fiction. But Owens knows the tricks of the genre, beginning the novel with a prologue set in 1969 in which a young man has died suspiciously in the swamp. The rest of the book cuts between the investigation, in which bigoted witnesses incriminate the “swamp girl”, and flashbacks to Kya’s youth and young adulthood, as local suspicion grows that makes the white people dislike her almost as much as they do the residents of the area known, in the prejudiced term of the time, as Colored Town.

Appreciating the fictional limitations of a feral recluse with no vocabulary or life skills, Owens provides tutors for Kya. As a result, the tone of the central section sometimes feels like YA, as Kya is instructed by a wise African American woman (one of the supporting characters who flirt with virtuous cliche) in the mysteries of men and menstruation.

But soon the narrative is satisfyingly reclaimed for older adults when at the local library Kya reads an article entitled “Sneaky Fuckers” in a science journal, which describes deceitful mating strategies. These include undersized bullfrogs who hang out with the alpha males with a view to picking up spare females, and the male damselfly, to whom God or Darwin has given a useful scoop that removes the sperm of a prior impregnator to clear the passage for his own.

As with those Attenborough clips in screen fiction, these anecdotes hover as metaphors for the behaviour of males in the story, and will allow the director of the eventual film to have fun with pointed cutaways. The divided timeline – a standard cinematic structure – will also help the screenwriter. And somewhere in stage schools now are the actors who, playing the young and older Kya, should have a shot at Oscars.

She is a vivid and original character. At times, her survival in isolation comes close to superheroism, but Owens convincingly depicts the instincts and calculations that get Kya into and out of difficulties. Without too much sentimentality, there is a strong emotional line in her desire to have a “shred of family”. The potential soppiness of a coming-of-age romance is also offset by the possibility that Kya is a murderer, although Owens has studied the big beasts of crime fiction sufficiently to leave room for doubt and surprises.

The storylines involving social competition and violent death feel like a reworking, from a young female perspective, of Theodore Dreiser ’s classic 1925 melodrama An American Tragedy . Like Dreiser, Owens combines high tension with precise detail about how people dress, sound, live and eat – the case studies in her book are both human and natural.

Surprise bestsellers are often works that chime with the times. Though set in the 1950s and 60s, Where the Crawdads Sing is, in its treatment of racial and social division and the fragile complex-ities of nature, obviously relevant to contemporary politics and ecology. But these themes will reach a huge audience though the writer’s old-fashioned talents for compelling character, plotting and landscape description.

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Where the Crawdads Sing

By delia owens.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, a coming-of-age crime drama about a girl growing up alone in the marshes of North Carolina.

In Where the Crawdads Sing , Kya is known in her town as the "Marsh Girl." She grows up in a shack out in the marshes bordering a small village on the coast of North Carolina. Her mother and her four older siblings all leave to get away from their abusive father, leaving her behind to fend for herself. Eventually, her father disappears as well.

Where the Crawdads Sing is part bildungsroman and part crime drama, centered around Kya, a wild and unkempt girl. The book follows the ups and downs of her life. She lives a lonely life, but her story is a hopeful one as well. With a little help, she's able to survive and even learn to read.

Despite her status as an outcast, her natural beauty catches the eye of two men in town. However, when the body of Chase Andrews, the local hotshot, is discovered in the marshes, she quickly becomes a prime suspect. The fragile life she has struggled and fought so hard to build is at risk.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

The Prologue opens with the discovery of the body of Chase Andrews in a swamp in 1969.

In Part I , Kya Clark grows up with her abusive father in a shack in the swampy outskirts of town in the 1950's (her mother and siblings all leave due because of Pa's abuse). Kya meets Tate, a boy from town that befriends her. When Kya is 10, Pa disappears (a couple nearby, Jumpin' and Mabel, help Kya to survive). As she grows up, Kya develops a keen knowledge of the outdoors. Kya and Tate reconnect, he teaches her to read, and it grows into a romance. When Tate leaves for college, he promises to come back, but later Tate worries that Kya (wild and unkempt) can't fit into his world. He doesn't return, and Kya gives up on him.

(Flash forward) Many years later, the body of Chase Andrews, the town hotshot and ladies' man, is found in the swamp at the bottom of the fire tower. An investigation starts up.

In Part II , Kya is now 19. Chase Andrews has been pursuing Kya aggressively, and she finally gives in to his advances. One day, Chase takes her to the fire tower, and she gives him a shell necklace as a gift. He promises to marry her, but Kya soon discovers that Chase is actually engaged to someone else. She dumps him. Meanwhile, Tate comes back and apologizes for what happened. He also wants to help Kya turn her nature diagrams into a book. Eventually, Kya's book is published in 1968.

In 1969, Kya is identified as a suspect in the Chase Andrews murder. Notably, Chase's shell necklace that he always wore was not found on his body. Eventually, Kya is arrested for Chase's death. The trial proceeds (reviewing evidence such as the missing necklace, fibers found on Chase's body, Kya's whereabouts, plus Chase had attacked Kya after being rebuffed two months before his death). But Kya is found not guilty, and she and Tate profess their love for each other.

Time passes, and Kya and Tate turn her shack into a nice cottage and remain there. Kya passes away at 64. Tate goes through her things and discovers evidence (in the form of a poem Kya wrote under a pseudonym and notably Chase's shell necklace) that Kya killed Chase. The book ends with Tate destroying the poems and tossing the necklace into the ocean.

For more detail, see the full Section-by-Section Summary .

If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ( $2 , $3 , or $5 ) or joining the Patreon !

Book Review

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens opens with a picture of a map and the discovery of a dead body in the marshes of North Carolina.

I was intrigued immediately when I saw it in the bookstore, though I put off reading it for a while. Ultimately, though, my curiosity won out as it hung in the bestseller lists, and I’m very glad it did.

Where the Crawdads Sing is about resiliency and survival, but also alienation. I loved the part about Kya’s childhood; it made for a unique story line as Kya learns to navigate the world on her own. The story focuses thematically a lot on her status as an outcast and sense of abandonment, as she is forced to fend for herself. In terms of pacing, it is eventful and mostly fast-moving.

Kya’s story has elements of romance, mystery and even a courtroom thriller interlude. Nature enthusiasts will also enjoy this book, as Kya’s love of the nature around her is conveyed through detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna, a reflection of the author’s background as a former wildlife scientist.

The compelling imagery is descriptive in the right places and sparse when it serves the story better instead. The book has a strong sense of place, transporting you to a different life where you can smell the salty air and sink your feet into the muddy grounds outside the seaside village.

Meanwhile, the discovery of a dead body leads to the Chase Andrews investigation that provides the suspense in the story. Kya’s story is also interspersed with flash-forwards detailing the progress of the investigation. I found this worked well, adding an element of mystery, since it’s not clear how it will play out for Kya or what exactly happened that night. There’s compelling evidence on both sides and the pacing of the investigation is spot-on, making for pleasurable and suspenseful reading.

Some Criticisms

As she heads into her teenage years, the romantic storylines start kicking in, and the melodrama starts ramping up as well. My enthusiasm waned a little bit at this point. The book is increasingly divorced from reality (the idea that a teenage boy would teach her not only to read but about her period seemed far-fetched, and it goes on from there) and plot events get a bit contrived.

Additionally, Kya’s internal journey, her mentally processing the events of her life, felt a little surface level. She struggles with being abandoned by her mother, and the book brings in interesting parallels to nature, but beyond that, events simply happen without much reflection. It felt like there were a number of missed opportunity for it to be a more insightful book.

But, for whatever criticisms I had while reading, the story easily won me over. As it approaches the date of the crime and the investigation ramps up, I was totally engrossed.

Read it or Skip It?

I read this book quickly and found myself delighted by it by the end. The book is more melodrama than a serious literary novel, but is such an engaging story that it’s easy to accept. It’s part romance, mystery, courtroom drama and ode to nature, all of which make for an appealing tale about the town outcast.

The setting is a distinctive “slice-of-life” that’s commonplace, yet not often portrayed clearly in books or movies. It is vividly drawn in a way that infuses the story with energy, a credit to Owen’s genuine love and respect for nature.

Where the Crawdads Sing has been very popular among book clubs, and deservedly so. It’s eventful and accessible, but thoughtfully written, all of which make it a good choice for readers of varying tastes. See it on Amazon or Book Depository .

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65 comments

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well crafted review

Fantastic review! I’ve been wondering about this one and I think I’ll check it out :)

Thank you! Glad to hear it, and I hope you like it if you end up getting a chance to read it! :)

This sounds like a book I might enjoy, tossing another one on the TBR!

That’s awesome to hear, thanks for letting me know and thanks for reading!

What a beautifully written, helpfully compartmentalised review! Feeling very inspired. Sounds like an engaging read too x

Thank you so much and thanks for reading!

Wonderful, thorough review. You don’t see a lot of coming-of-age murder mysteries. I’m putting this on my TBR list. Thanks for the post.

Hey Rosi! Yes, I liked that it felt like a unique book and story, both in terms of the setting and the plot. Definitely not cookie cutter. Hope you love it if you get a chance to read it — it goes by quickly! Nice to hear from you as always, and cheers! :)

Jennifer, you are one of the best writers I have seen. I read your reviews because I love the way you talk about books. Your honesty is much appreciated and gives me insight into titles I may otherwise never pick up.

Hey Jen, that’s such a kind thing for you to say. I really appreciate your feedback and that you take the time to read my reviews! My goal in writing this blog has always been to help books find the right readers, so thank you for saying that. I genuinely value your encouragement, thanks again! :)

Nicely done review.

Hi Martie! Thank you very much and nice to hear from you again! :)

Melodrama irritates me, but the synopsis sounds so good that I need to read it. This book is high on my priority list. I’m happy it’s good. Great review!

Honestly, it bothered me a little at first, but I think there’s a lot of wonderful but unrealistic stories out there. If it didn’t all add up to something solid and interesting it would have bothered me more, but I think it came together in a way that made me feel like it was worth overlooking. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did if you get a chance to read it! :)

You’ve motivated me to put this book on my TBR!

Thank you for reading and visiting! Hope you enjoy it if you get a chance to read it!

I’ve been interested in this one but a bit wary since I really didn’t like the other Reese’s Book Club pick I’ve read. Glad you enjoyed it. Your review definitely makes it likely I’ll give it a go after all.

Hey, that’s great to hear — yeah I mean I guess she picks out one new-ish book a month which is actually kind of a lot so I suppose they can’t all be winners. I think this one is definitely one of her better recs though, hope you like it!

Beautiful review of a beautiful book! I enjoyed this, too. It took some patience with all that description, but in the end, it worked to create that sense of place you described.

Thank you for reading! I usually don’t have a ton of patience for unnecessary description (I’m always a little wary of books that are described by reviewers as “lyrical” since sometimes that translates into lots of lengthy descriptive passages) but I thought Owens did a good job of balancing out creating atmosphere and moving the plot forward — thanks for dropping by! :)

Sounds like an interesting book – even with the negative parts.

I really enjoyed it, thanks for reading! :)

wow, you give thorough reviews…

haha what can I say, I love talking about books! :)

too bad, my genre doesn’t fit… have a wonderful weekend

Good to know that this is more melodrama than a serious literary novel. I do like the sound of this slice of life book. Great review!

Thank you and thanks for reading! :)

Thanks for the balanced review! Will consider picking this up.

Glad to hear that, and thanks for reading!

I thought the book was wonderful. I loved all of it. It had a perfect ending.

glad to hear it — yeah I was really impressed by the ending as well! thanks for dropping by!

I will definitely have to pick this one up. You make it sound compelling. Thanks for the post.

Very interesting review. I’ve been split on a lot of her book club picks but I have noticed that almost all of them she has the movie rights for which makes me a little cynical about her choices in some cases :)

yeah, I can understand that. On one hand, I’m glad that the adaptations are giving authors a way to make some big dollars. On the other hand, it is kind of annoying when I read books that seem to be written in a way that feels like the’re prepackaged for hollywood though. So I have mixed feelings.

Fabulous review

Please read my first post

I subscribed to your blog just now because you had such a thorough review of this book. I am about halfway through the book at this point, and while I have enjoyed it, I have found, as you, there were missed opportunities for more development in some areas, and some events which seemed unreasonable. Overall, I am enjoying the book. Great job! I look forward to reading more of your reviews!

Hi Sandra, thank you so much for the thoughtful comment! Much appreciated. Thanks for reading! Even with those criticisms, I’m glad I read it. I hope you enjoy the rest of it as well!

I’ve read 33 novels so far in 2019 and this is my favorite. Loved it!

NIcely written review.

Terrific. Will help at my book club. Ty.

Thanks for the review. I am yet to read this one!

Thanks so much. I appreciate you time to share.

The focus on nature was refreshing in contrast to the sadness of Kya literally raising herself. Changing back and forth with the time frame was a bit distracting as was the poetry inserted here and there ( not especially good poetry) but as you near the end that is explained. I was more impressed with how Kya, in school just a day, could educate herself enough to write books about the plants and critters living in the marsh and become a well respected author. Then the trial about who killed the jerk Chase Andrews with a surprising end when she is found not guilty. Kya goes on to live a happy life with her original friend and first love Tate, but in the end he discovers she really did kill Chase. There were some positive things in her life but such a disfunctional family and so much hatred from most of the townspeople offset the real beauty of the marsh .

Consider listening to it. The reader’s soft. N. Carolina accent lends an authenticity to the flora and fauna descriptions.

This is the most balanced review I’ve read yet of this book. It sounds like it goes a bit off the rails but is overall worth the read. Thanks for the post!

Not great literature at all. Just a story. Delia needs to read more of the best HEMINGWAY, STEINBECK, CATHER and the other great authors to learn symbolism, conflict and the art of not telling but showing.

My feelings about the character Kya are that she really could be cast as a Native American. She has the instincts and abilities of a Native American woman. Reese Witherspoon and Delia Owens, maybe you can consider this as a facet of the character.

I am looking for some good solid books for my avid pre teen reader. Do think the scope of details would be ok for someone that young?

Hmmm, I think it’s a little iffy. There’s definitely talk about sex, sexual desires and at one point one of the characters gets kind of aggressive about it.

Great start but then descended into a melodrama with an eye on the prize of a television or film adaptation. It was so obvious and disappointing. Unconvincing after the very promising first chapters onwards. The premise was unlikely and my interest waned when the story turned into a murder mystery. It was obvious that Kya killed Chase. Who else would bother?

Thank you for an excellent review. Loved the book but also felt it dragged at points. The Ode to Nature and the child that nature nourished when people failed was spell-binding.

I think it was proven that there was no time for Kya to kill Chase

Did Kaya have her own children with Tate or were they just a flashback of her childhood

I hope the movie stands up. I remember waiting with great anticipation for “the Prince of tides” movie to come out and feared it would digress from the book. I was delighted to be wrong.

I loved this book but have struggled to understand the absence of Chase’s wife in the courtroom. Why isn’t she there to support justice for her husband, staring down Kya and acting bereaved?And why did she allow her husband to wear a necklace every day of his life, fashioned for him by another woman? Why wasn’t she a suspect in her husband’s murder, given that jealousy and vengeance could have been her motive? She had as much reason as Kya to hate Chase and to remove the all-significant necklace. Anyone else agree?

I believe author wants reader to know who killed chase from early on. The phrase where the crawdads sings , essentially speaks to how nature will always try to ensure continuation of species. She was raised by nature.the references to female fire flies and praying mantis who kill males to continue survival of future generations. The mother fox who is injured who leaves her kits to die,so she can come day have future litters. Biggest disappointment in story line was that ” Tate” was not aware kya killed chase. She only received red hat after he attempted to rape her. It could only have been Tate or kya.

I found the book to be a quick read, and suspenseful until the last page. The characters were realistic and each one was well developed.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful review!!! this helps me to determine whether or not to read the book :) the movie was fantastic!

The Literary Edit

Where the Crawdads Sing Review (Author Delia Owens)

Before starting this Where the Crawdads Sing review and in all my years of book blogging, I’ve learnt that, on the whole, books are divisive. Much like many things in life – such as, for example, whether north or south of the Thames is the better part of London, or which city – Melbourne or Sydney – is the more liveable one (I’m a south London and Sydney-sider for anyone who’s remotely interested) opinions are, more often than not, split. There will be those that adore a book, those that don’t, and those that fall somewhere in between. This was until I read – and posted about my reading – Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, on both my Facebook and Instagram account, to entirely unanimous praise of Owens debut.

And no sooner had I started to read Where the Crawdads Sing than I began to see why it was so consistently adored by all who had already read it.

Where the Crawdads Sing Review

A story of resilience, survival and hope, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens tells the story of Kya – known locally in the North Carolina town in which she resides as the Marsh Girl – who is abandoned at a young age by her parents, siblings and finally the school system; and left to fend for herself.

As Kya grows and learns more about life through her interactions with the creatures of the Marsh, two young men enter her life. One is her brother’s older friend, Tate, who teaches her to read and shows her acceptance and happiness. But when he, too, leaves the Marsh behind for a learned life at university, she learned not to trust nor depend on anyone but herself, and resigns herself to a life spent along on the marsh, until Chase Andrews comes along.

And so when Chase is later found dead, rumours are rife as to Kya’s possible involvement in his murder. Over the years there’s been much hearsay as to the nature of Kya and Chase’s relationship, and with no other suspects so-to-speak, the finger is swiftly pointed at Kya.

Rich with poetic prose, lyrical depictions of the marshlands and atmosphere, Where the Crawdads Sing is a beautiful and compelling read steeped in nature. A fusion of murder, mystery, coming-of-age and love-story, Where the Crawdads Sing is a poignant and powerful tale that will stay with its readers long after its gripping finale and I couldn’t wait to review Where the Crawdads Sing.

Where the Crawdads Sing Summary

For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life–until the unthinkable happens.

Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Karen Russell,  Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

About Delia Owens

Delia Owens is the co-author of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa— Cry of the Kalahari, The Eye of the Elephant , and  Secrets of the Savanna . She has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing and has been published in  Nature, The African Journal of Ecology , and  International Wildlife , among many others. She currently lives in Idaho, where she continues her support for the people and wildlife of Zambia. Where the Crawdads Sing is her first novel. Check out her website for a detailed biography .

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5 comments on “Where the Crawdads Sing Review (Author Delia Owens)”

I somehow missed this book. Adding this to my summer reading list. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Lucy!

Thanks for stopping by Crystal! I hope you love it as much as I did xo

I finished reading this book only few days ago, and I can say it’s one of the most “unputdownable” books I’ve ever read! And when I think that I hadn’t heard about it before I received it as a gift from a dear friend 🙂

Hi Georgiana, I’m so glad you enjoyed it too – it really is a wonderful book! xo

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By Alexandra Alter

• Dec. 21, 2019

In the summer of 2018, Putnam published an unusual debut novel by a retired wildlife biologist named Delia Owens . The book, which had an odd title and didn’t fit neatly into any genre, hardly seemed destined to be a blockbuster, so Putnam printed about 28,000 copies.

It wasn’t nearly enough.

A year and a half later, the novel, “ Where the Crawdads Sing ,” an absorbing, atmospheric tale about a lonely girl’s coming-of-age in the marshes of North Carolina, has sold more than four and a half million copies. It’s an astonishing trajectory for any debut novelist, much less for a reclusive, 70-year-old scientist, whose previous published works chronicled the decades she spent in the deserts and valleys of Botswana and Zambia, where she studied hyenas, lions and elephants.

As the end of 2019 approaches, “Crawdads” has sold more print copies than any other adult title this year — fiction or nonfiction — according to NPD BookScan, blowing away the combined print sales of new novels by John Grisham, Margaret Atwood and Stephen King . Putnam has returned to the printers nearly 40 times to feed a seemingly bottomless demand for the book. Foreign rights have sold in 41 countries.

Industry analysts have struggled to explain the novel’s staying power, particularly at a moment when fiction sales over all are flagging, and most blockbuster novels drop off the best-seller list after a few weeks.

For the past several years, adult fiction sales have steadily fallen — in 2019, adult fiction sales through early December totaled around 116 million units, down from nearly 144 million in 2015, according to NPD BookScan. In a tough retail environment for fiction, publishers and agents frequently complain that it has become harder and harder for even established novelists to break through the noise of the news cycle.

“Crawdads” seems to be the lone exception. After a burst of holiday sales, it landed back at No. 1 on The Times’s latest fiction best-seller list , where it has held a spot for 67 weeks, with 30 weeks at No. 1.

“This book has defied the new laws of gravity,” said Peter Hildick-Smith, the president of the Codex Group, which analyzes the book industry. “It’s managed to hold its position in a much more consistent way than just about anything.”

The novel is resonating with a swath of American readers at a moment when mass media are deeply fragmented and algorithm-driven entertainment companies like Netflix and Amazon feed consumers a stream of content tailored to their particular tastes. “Crawdads” instead seems to appeal to a wide demographic of American readers. According to a survey of nearly 4,000 book buyers conducted by the Codex Group, respondents who read “Crawdads” came from across the political spectrum, with 55 percent identifying as progressive, 30 percent as conservative and 15 percent as centrists.

For a book about a girl who is isolated in the wilderness and wrestling with loneliness, “Crawdads” has had an oddly unifying effect in a time of rapid technological advances and constant social media connectivity. And its success has upended Ms. Owens’s own solitary existence. This fall, she went on her fifth tour for the novel, with appearances in Georgia, Oklahoma, Kansas, Alabama, Florida and New York, where a talk at the New York Botanical Garden reached capacity, with an additional 100 people signing up for the wait list.

“I have never connected with people the way I have with my readers,” she said in an interview. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

Like the movie industry, publishing has become a winner-take-all business, with a handful of blockbusters commanding all the attention and sales, so surprise breakout hits have become increasingly rare. But “Crawdads” had several things going for it. The plot seemed tailored to appeal to a wide audience, with its combination of murder mystery, lush nature writing, romance and a coming-of-age survival story. The novel also got an early boost from independent booksellers, who widely recommended it, and from the actress Reese Witherspoon, who selected “Crawdads” for her book club and plans to produce a feature film adaptation of the novel, and appeared in a bubbly video with Ms. Owens on Instagram this year.

But even those factors fail to fully account for why the book took off as it did, and continues to sell so robustly.

One of the most surprising things about the success of “Crawdads” is that sales began to accelerate months after it came out — an anomaly in publishing, where sales typically peak just after publication, aided by the initial advertising and marketing around a title.

This past January, six months after its release, the novel hit No. 1 on The Times’s fiction best-seller list. That same month, it appeared at the top of Amazon Charts’ Most Sold and Most Read fiction lists, and maintained its dominant position for the next 16 weeks, the longest streak that any book has occupied the top of both Amazon weekly lists. In February, it began selling well at big box stores like Sam’s Club, Costco and BJ’s Wholesale Club. By March it had sold a million copies; two months later, it had sold two million.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in 30 years,” said Jaci Updike, president of sales for Penguin Random House, who has overseen strategies for best sellers like “The Da Vinci Code,” “The Girl on the Train” and “Gone Girl.” “This book has broken all the friggin’ rules. We like to have a comparison title so that we can do sales forecasts, but in this case none of the comparisons work.”

The combination of word-of-mouth buzz and the novel’s prominence on the best-seller list set off a self-fulfilling cycle: The book’s visibility drove sales, and sales drove visibility. Merriam-Webster added “crawdad” to its list of the top 10 words of 2019, noting that searches for “crawdad” on its online dictionary spiked by 1,200 percent this year.

“Once it took off, it fed on itself and it’s been remarkably resilient,” said Kristen McLean, the executive director of business development at the NPD Group .

No one seems more caught off guard by the book’s success than Ms. Owens.

“I never really thought I could write a novel,” she said.

Ms. Owens began working on it a decade ago, when she got the idea for a story about a girl who grows up alone in the marshes of North Carolina in the 1950s and ’60s after her family abandons her, and becomes an outcast who is later charged with murdering a young man.

Though the story is invented, Ms. Owens said she drew on her experience living in the wilderness, cut off from society. “It’s about trying to make it in a wild place,” she said.

For most of her life, she lived as far away from people and as close to wild animals as she could get. Growing up in Georgia, Ms. Owens spent most of her free time outside in the woods. Inspired by Jane Goodall, she studied zoology at the University of Georgia and later got her doctorate in animal behavior from the University of California, Davis.

In 1974, she and her husband at the time, Mark Owens, set off to study wildlife in Africa. They set up a research camp in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, where they spent their days closely observing lions and hyenas, studying their migration patterns and social behavior.

The Owenses later became renowned for their foundation’s work in Zambia, where they provided job training, microloans, health care and education to villagers. But they also generated controversy. Mr. Owens, trying to stop poachers from killing elephants and other wildlife, turned their base camp into “the command center for anti-poaching operations” — which Ms. Owens thought was risky, according to her account in their memoir “The Eye of the Elephant.”

In 1995, one of the anti-poaching missions ended in tragedy when a suspected poacher was apparently shot and killed, an incident that Slate reported on this past summer and that The New Yorker wrote about in 2010 . Mark and Delia Owens, who weren’t present at the shooting, left the country and haven’t been back since. After returning to the United States in 1996, they settled in northern Idaho, on a secluded 720-acre ranch. Several years ago, after more than 40 years of marriage, they divorced, and this year, Ms. Owens moved to the mountains of North Carolina, near Asheville.

Mr. Owens wasn’t available to comment, according to the Owenses’ friend and former lawyer Bob Ivey, who confirmed that there were never any charges filed and that there haven’t been any recent developments in the case.

Ms. Owens said she had nothing to do with the shooting and was never accused of wrongdoing but declined to elaborate on the circumstances.

“I was not involved,” she added. “There was never a case, there was nothing.”

She brought the conversation back to her novel and likened her experience to the ordeals faced by her fictional heroine Kya Clark, who is subjected to vicious rumors and ostracized.

“It’s painful to have that come up, but it’s what Kya had to deal with, name calling,” Ms. Owens said during an interview in New York this fall. “You just have to put your head up or down, or whichever, you have to keep going and be strong. I’ve been charged by elephants before.”

Later that evening, Ms. Owens, who still seems unaccustomed to the spotlight, invoked charging elephants again, when she took the stage at the Botanical Garden and faced a crowd of more than 400 people. Looking slightly unsettled, Ms. Owens compared the experience of addressing the audience to the adrenaline rush she felt many years before when, in an effort to escape an elephant that was rushing at her, she jumped into a crocodile-infested river.

“I’ve lived in remote settings for most of my life,” she told the crowd. “There are more people in this room than I would see in six months.”

Follow Alexandra Alter on Twitter: @xanalter .

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Review of where the crawdads sing, recently viewed.

Books & Bordeaux

Book Reviews, Discussion Guides, and Wine-Book Pairings

“Call no man happy until he is dead. Herodotus.” Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, “I’m not dead yet, and, mostly because I’m not dead yet, I’m happy as a clamboy.” “The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done.”

• Historical Fiction
• wine: riesling

Where the Crawdads Sing Book Review: The Trials and Triumphs of a Life Lived on One’s Own Terms

If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to fall in love with a swamp (!) Delia Owens breaks it down and convinces you to fall in love, as well.

Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace—as though not built to fly—against the roar of a thousand snow geese. Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing is a great book-club book because it explores several themes and is a bit divisive in terms of taste—both of which make the discussion richer ! As an added bonus, Delia Owens’ website has an entire Book Club Kit  which includes a discussion guide, an interview with Delia Owens, and Kya’s cookbook. Anytime I read a book that interests me, I go online to find more information, so I really appreciate that Owens took the extra step to create these resources. For our book club, I added some questions to address topics about the book and the author that we wanted to discuss. Our discussion for Crawdads was so fun and engaging. We may have spent half the time trying to determine if Owens intended to write about a murder in isolation—when she witnessed a real-life murder in isolation in Africa many years earlier.

Jump to Where the Crawdads Sing discussion questions

Consensus from our group re Crawdads is that some elements were successful and some were unsuccessful. Owens clearly loves nature, and we all appreciated that she could describe nature so beautifully. Owens was successful in another way, too: Kya’s story prompts the reader to ask big questions . For example, questions about the interactions of economic disparities and race, the trade-offs between living on your own terms and living in dangerous isolation, the merits of formal education versus an education through experience with the natural world, and how the pursuit of a higher understanding of our world can results in a higher understanding of ourselves.

Wine Selection & Tasting Notes

Lone Orchid Riesling. Scent: Starfruit, pineapple, green apple. The note of green apple continues on the palate, and sweetness and tang is reminiscent of a green apple jolly rancher–in a fun way!

Review cont.

Kya’s inner narration references the natural world again and again to explain her relationships and work through her problems. For anyone who has ever taken a moment to appreciate the quiet calm that the natural world can bring to the noise of competing worries inside your mind, you will absolutely love how Owens describes Kya’s experience with nature.

As she pushed off, she knew no one would ever see this sandbar again. The elements had created a brief and shifting smile of sand, angled just so. The next tide, the next current would design another sandbar, and another, but never this one. Not the one who caught her. The one who told her a thing or two.

An unsuccessful element of Crawdads is the amount of telling versus showing that occurs with increasing frequency the further along you get in the novel. Our group also felt that the pacing dragged in the middle. But one of my biggest issues with the story is with the main mystery…

Any plot or style contentions aside, the ethereal descriptions of nature and Kya’s connection to the land are undeniably beautiful, and they permeate the novel. Crawdads is primarily this: a depiction of life lived on one’s own terms. And in that way, it is very well done.

She strolled like a sleepwalker as the moon pulled herself naked from the waters and climbed limb by limb through the oaks. The slick mud of the lagoon shore glowed in the intense light, and hundreds of fireflies dotted the woods. Wearing a secondhand white dress with a flowing skirt and waving her arms slowly about, Kya waltzed to the music of katydids and leopard frogs.

Where the Crawdads Sing Discussion Questions

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Books We Love

20 new books hitting shelves this summer that our critics can't wait to read.

Meghan Collins Sullivan

June is around the corner, meaning summer is almost here! As we look forward to travel and staycations, plane rides and trips to the beach, we've asked our book critics for some advice: What upcoming fiction and nonfiction are they most looking forward to reading?

Their picks range from memoirs to sci-fi and fantasy to translations, love stories and everything in between. Here's a look:

Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope

I was hooked when I first saw the gorgeous cover for Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope. But the novel's premise put it at the top of my summer reading list. Penelope is known for unforgettable characters, world-building, beautiful writing and robust storytelling. Her latest work, inspired by actual events — the drowned Black towns of the American South — promises a magical, mythical and powerful tale of a young woman's quest to save her town. A historical fantasy must-read. (June 4) — Denny Bryce

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The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan

The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan has everything I look for in a book: a unique and startling voice, a queer protagonist and a deep understanding of a particular time and place. George — once György — is a gay Hungarian immigrant working as a screenwriter in McCarthy-era Hollywood, occasionally fantasizing about his officemate, Jack. When a once-famous actress named Madeline invites George to stay and write at her spacious Malibu house, she won't take no for an answer — and so George finds himself in a hedonistic milieu where pleasure, politics and strong personalities intermingle. (June 4) — Ilana Masad

Mirrored Heavens: Between Earth & Sky, Book 3 by Rebecca Roanhorse

Rebecca Roanhorse is one of my auto-read authors — and one major reason is because of her fire Between Earth and Sky series. That trilogy comes to a stunning, fevered conclusion with Mirrored Heavens . All of the characters you love, hate and love to hate will converge on the city of Tova. Get ready for an epic battle between ancient gods, their human avatars and the mortals caught in between. (June 4) — Alex Brown

Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water by Amorina Kingdon

You may know about 52 Blue , whose vocalizations likely go unheard by some other whales; it captured worldwide sympathy and became a pop-culture metaphor. But did you know all whale song is critically disrupted by ships? If that gets you wondering, keep an eye out for Sing Like Fish , which promises to illuminate the fragile symphony of the deep. (June 4) — Genevieve Valentine

Consent: A Memoir by Jill Ciment

I look forward to reading Jill Ciment's Consent and to the discussions it's sure to provoke. In this follow-up memoir to Half a Life, Ciment reconsiders what she wrote 25 years ago about her teenage affair and marriage to her art teacher, 30 years her senior. Half a Life was written before the #MeToo movement, and before her husband died at the age of 93 after 45 years of marriage. Consent promises a fuller picture. (June 11) — Heller McAlpin

Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton

As we continue to experience the frenzy of Harlem Renaissance celebrations, commemorations and historical resonance, Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton is the perfect addition to the litany of works set in this artistic period this year. It examines the intense and frequently degenerating relationship between patrons and artists during this intellectual and cultural movement. In this dual-timeline gothic thriller, a modern writer discovers a family heirloom painting by a Harlem Renaissance artist, which connects her family to a mysterious past. This historical novel is one I'm eager to read because it deftly exposes the layers of creative ownership, especially when race and wealth are involved. (June 11) — Keishel Williams

Horror Movie: A Novel by Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay is one of the most entertaining and innovative voices in contemporary fiction regardless of genre. Horror Movie , a story about a cursed movie that never came out and is about to get a remake, is a love letter to horror novels and horror movies, as well as a tense narrative that will redefine the cursed film subgenre. Tremblay is one of the modern masters of horror, and this new novel promises to be packed with the author's distinctive voice, knack for ambiguity and intrigue, and superb atmosphere. (June 11) — Gabino Iglesias

Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

Every so often there's a nonfiction title I covet like it's the next installment in my favorite mystery series. This summer it's Cue the Sun! Based on in-depth interviews with more than 300 sources from every aspect of the production process, this book is a cultural history of the genre that ate American entertainment, from New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum. It combines the appeal of a page-turning thriller and the heft of serious scholarship. Juicy and thoughtful, it's a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture. (June 25) — Carole V. Bell

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Bannen

In this return to the delightfully wacky world established in one of my personal top-five romance novels of all time, The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy , Megan Bannen takes on the friends to lovers trope with a combination of madcap joie de vivre and the exhausted practicality of a mom who's had enough. Also, there are dragons! (July 2) — Caitlyn Paxson

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş

I am eagerly awaiting Ayşegül Savaş' The Anthropologists . Born in Istanbul, Savaş has lived in England, Denmark and the U.S. also and now resides in France; in this novel she takes up themes of cultural migration through focus on a young couple seeking an apartment in a foreign city. I'm intrigued to discover how Savaş gifts her characters with an anthropological lens of exploration. (July 9) — Barbara J. King

Elevator in Saigon by Thuân, translated by Nguyen An Lý

Elevator in Saigon is a literal and structural exquisite corpse , capturing Vietnam's eventful period from 1954 to 2004. Mimicking an elevator's movement, the novel heightens our yearning for romance and mystery, while unflinchingly exposing such narrative shaft. Channeling Marguerite Duras and Patrick Modiano, the book also offers a dead-on tour of a society cunningly leaping from one ideological mode to the next. As if challenging Rick's parting words to Ilsa in Casablanca , Thuận's sophomore novel in English implies that geopolitical debacles might have been mitigated if personal relations were held in more elevated regard than "a hill of beans." (July 9) — Thúy Đinh

Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida, translated by Haydn Trowell

Atsuhiro Yoshida's Goodnight Tokyo begins with a film company procurer who's tasked with finding fresh kumquats for a production. From there, interlinked tales of Tokyo residents unspool in unpredictable directions. Characters range from a cabdriver to a star of a detective TV series who might be an actual detective. Readers will be reminded of Jim Jarmusch's 1991 movie Night on Earth , which also takes place in the wee hours of the morning and threads together the stories of strangers. (July 9) — Leland Cheuk

Navola: A novel by Paolo Bacigalupi

I love when a beloved author — especially one known mostly for a certain type of book — throws us a daring curveball. Navola is exactly such a pitch. Paolo Bacigalupi, who has won pretty much every major award in the science-fiction field with his climate-conscious dystopianism, is veering hard left with his new novel. It doesn't take place in the future, and it isn't a cautionary tale. Instead, it's a hefty tome of high fantasy set in a dreamed-up world akin to Renaissance Florence. Only with, you guessed it, dragons. But also high finance, political intrigue, and de' Medici-esque opulence. Bacigalupi is one of today's most gripping spinners of speculative fiction, and I can't wait to dive into this surprising magical foray. (July 9) — Jason Heller

The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary

In 2002, two train carriages were set on fire in Gujarat, India. Within three weeks, more than 2,000 Muslims were murdered in response by Hindu mobs. By the end of the year, more than 50,000 Muslims became refugees in their own country. The Lucky Ones is a unique memoir in English of this largest-ever massacre in independent India . It is also about a communal crisis bringing a fractured family together. A must-read in our warring world today. (July 16) — Jenny Bhatt

Sharks Don't Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist by Jasmin Graham

Author Jasmin Graham is a marine biologist specializing in smalltooth sawfish and hammerhead sharks. Who are the real sharks in this story? Graham had to face the sharp-teethed truths of academia, while creating a world of curiosity and discovery around the complex lives of sharks. To combat the racism she encountered in academia, Graham created an "ocean of her own" to become an independent scientist and a champion of social justice, a journey she unspools in this new memoir. (July 16) — Martha Ann Toll

Liars by Sarah Manguso

I have long been a fan of Sarah Manguso's crystalline prose, from her fragmented illness memoir The Two Kinds of Decay to her tightly constrained 2022 novel Very Cold People . Her second novel , Liars , marries restraint with rage — in it, Manguso traces the full arc of a 15-year relationship between Jane, a successful writer, and John, a dilettante artist-cum-techie, in aphoristic vignettes. The result is a furious, propulsive meditation on wifehood, motherhood and artistic ambition. (July 23) — Kristen Martin

The Horse: A Novel by Willy Vlautin

Musician and Lean on Pete author Willy Vlautin captures the American West like few other writers. His prose is always excellent, his characters always beautifully drawn, and that promises to be the case with his next novel, about an isolated Nevada man in his 60s who is visited by a blind horse that refuses to leave. (July 30) — Michael Schaub

Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe by Ken Krimstein

Art and science collide in Ken Krimstein's new graphic biography . In this book, the author of the brilliant and whimsical The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt similarly translates careful research into scenic, emotive comics — in this case tracking the potential effects of an adventitious meeting in Prague between two geniuses on the cusp of world-changing discoveries. (Aug. 20) — Tahneer Oksman

Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I'd probably be interested in a new biography of Audre Lorde if it focused on the eating habits of the brilliant thinker, poet, feminist and activist. But biographer Alexis Pauline Gumbs promises to more than exceed that bar. An award-winning poet, writer, feminist and activist in her own right, Gumbs is among the first researchers to delve into Lorde's manuscript archives. The resulting book highlights the late author's commitment to interrogating what it means to survive on this planet — and how Lorde's radical understanding of ecology can guide us today. (Aug. 20) — Ericka Taylor

Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases by Maia Lee-Chin, illustrated by Marta Bertello

To those claiming Latin is dead, I say res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself — in children's cartoons , Hollywood cartoons and enduring epics . As a fan of both Mr. Peabody and the Muses, the idea of combining Maia Lee-Chin's thoughtful scholarship and Marta Bertello's dynamic artistry is captivating. Their new book reimagines the world of Latin's invention and tops my summer reading list. (Aug. 27) — Marcela Davison Avilés

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20 New Books Hitting Shelves This Summer That NPR Critics Can’t Wait to Read

Please try again

June is around the corner, meaning summer is almost here! As we look forward to travel and staycations, plane rides and trips to the beach, we’ve asked our book critics for some advice: What upcoming fiction and nonfiction are they most looking forward to reading?

Their picks range from memoirs to sci-fi and fantasy to translations, love stories and everything in between. Here’s a look:

‘Daughter of the Merciful Deep’ by Leslye Penelope

I was hooked when I first saw the gorgeous cover for Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope. But the novel’s premise put it at the top of my summer reading list. Penelope is known for unforgettable characters, world-building, beautiful writing and robust storytelling. Her latest work, inspired by actual events — the drowned Black towns of the American South — promises a magical, mythical and powerful tale of a young woman’s quest to save her town. A historical fantasy must-read. (June 4) — Denny Bryce

‘The Future Was Color’ by Patrick Nathan

The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan has everything I look for in a book: a unique and startling voice, a queer protagonist and a deep understanding of a particular time and place. George — once György — is a gay Hungarian immigrant working as a screenwriter in McCarthy-era Hollywood, occasionally fantasizing about his officemate, Jack. When a once-famous actress named Madeline invites George to stay and write at her spacious Malibu house, she won’t take no for an answer — and so George finds himself in a hedonistic milieu where pleasure, politics and strong personalities intermingle. (June 4) — Ilana Masad

‘Mirrored Heavens: Between Earth & Sky, Book 3’ by Rebecca Roanhorse

Rebecca Roanhorse is one of my auto-read authors — and one major reason is because of her fire Between Earth and Sky series. That trilogy comes to a stunning, fevered conclusion with Mirrored Heavens . All of the characters you love, hate and love to hate will converge on the city of Tova. Get ready for an epic battle between ancient gods, their human avatars and the mortals caught in between. (June 4) — Alex Brown

‘Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water’ by Amorina Kingdon

You may know about 52 Blue , whose vocalizations likely go unheard by some other whales; it captured worldwide sympathy and became a pop-culture metaphor. But did you know all whale song is critically disrupted by ships ? If that gets you wondering, keep an eye out for Sing Like Fish , which promises to illuminate the fragile symphony of the deep. (June 4) — Genevieve Valentine

‘Consent: A Memoir’ by Jill Ciment

I look forward to reading Jill Ciment’s Consent and to the discussions it’s sure to provoke. In this follow-up memoir to Half a Life, Ciment reconsiders what she wrote 25 years ago about her teenage affair and marriage to her art teacher, 30 years her senior. Half a Life was written before the #MeToo movement, and before her husband died at the age of 93 after 45 years of marriage. Consent promises a fuller picture. (June 11) — Heller McAlpin

‘Do What Godmother Says’ by L.S. Stratton

As we continue to experience the frenzy of Harlem Renaissance celebrations, commemorations and historical resonance, Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton is the perfect addition to the litany of works set in this artistic period this year. It examines the intense and frequently degenerating relationship between patrons and artists during this intellectual and cultural movement. In this dual-timeline gothic thriller, a modern writer discovers a family heirloom painting by a Harlem Renaissance artist, which connects her family to a mysterious past. This historical novel is one I’m eager to read because it deftly exposes the layers of creative ownership, especially when race and wealth are involved. (June 11) — Keishel Williams

‘Horror Movie: A Novel’ by Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay is one of the most entertaining and innovative voices in contemporary fiction regardless of genre. Horror Movie , a story about a cursed movie that never came out and is about to get a remake, is a love letter to horror novels and horror movies, as well as a tense narrative that will redefine the cursed film subgenre. Tremblay is one of the modern masters of horror, and this new novel promises to be packed with the author’s distinctive voice, knack for ambiguity and intrigue, and superb atmosphere. (June 11) — Gabino Iglesias

‘Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV’ by Emily Nussbaum

Every so often there’s a nonfiction title I covet like it’s the next installment in my favorite mystery series. This summer it’s Cue the Sun! Based on in-depth interviews with more than 300 sources from every aspect of the production process, this book is a cultural history of the genre that ate American entertainment, from New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum. It combines the appeal of a page-turning thriller and the heft of serious scholarship. Juicy and thoughtful, it’s a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture. (June 25) — Carole V. Bell

‘The Undermining of Twyla and Frank’ by Megan Bannen

In this return to the delightfully wacky world established in one of my personal top-five romance novels of all time, The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy , Megan Bannen takes on the friends to lovers trope with a combination of madcap joie de vivre and the exhausted practicality of a mom who’s had enough. Also, there are dragons! (July 2) — Caitlyn Paxson

‘The Anthropologists’ by Ayşegül Savaş

I am eagerly awaiting Ayşegül Savaş’ The Anthropologists . Born in Istanbul, Savaş has lived in England, Denmark and the U.S. also and now resides in France; in this novel she takes up themes of cultural migration through focus on a young couple seeking an apartment in a foreign city. I’m intrigued to discover how Savaş gifts her characters with an anthropological lens of exploration. (July 9) — Barbara J. King

‘Elevator in Saigon by Thuân’ translated by Nguyen An Lý

Elevator in Saigon is a literal and structural exquisite corpse , capturing Vietnam’s eventful period from 1954 to 2004. Mimicking an elevator’s movement, the novel heightens our yearning for romance and mystery, while unflinchingly exposing such narrative shaft. Channeling Marguerite Duras and Patrick Modiano, the book also offers a dead-on tour of a society cunningly leaping from one ideological mode to the next. As if challenging Rick’s parting words to Ilsa in Casablanca , Thuận’s sophomore novel in English implies that geopolitical debacles might have been mitigated if personal relations were held in more elevated regard than “a hill of beans.” (July 9) — Thúy Đinh

‘Goodnight Tokyo’ by Atsuhiro Yoshida, translated by Haydn Trowell

Atsuhiro Yoshida’s Goodnight Tokyo begins with a film company procurer who’s tasked with finding fresh kumquats for a production. From there, interlinked tales of Tokyo residents unspool in unpredictable directions. Characters range from a cabdriver to a star of a detective TV series who might be an actual detective. Readers will be reminded of Jim Jarmusch’s 1991 movie Night on Earth , which also takes place in the wee hours of the morning and threads together the stories of strangers. (July 9) — Leland Cheuk

‘Navola: A Novel’ by Paolo Bacigalupi

I love when a beloved author — especially one known mostly for a certain type of book — throws us a daring curveball. Navola is exactly such a pitch. Paolo Bacigalupi, who has won pretty much every major award in the science-fiction field with his climate-conscious dystopianism, is veering hard left with his new novel. It doesn’t take place in the future, and it isn’t a cautionary tale. Instead, it’s a hefty tome of high fantasy set in a dreamed-up world akin to Renaissance Florence. Only with, you guessed it, dragons. But also high finance, political intrigue, and de’ Medici-esque opulence. Bacigalupi is one of today’s most gripping spinners of speculative fiction, and I can’t wait to dive into this surprising magical foray. (July 9) — Jason Heller

‘The Lucky Ones: A Memoir’ by Zara Chowdhary

In 2002, two train carriages were set on fire in Gujarat, India. Within three weeks, more than 2,000 Muslims were murdered in response by Hindu mobs. By the end of the year, more than 50,000 Muslims became refugees in their own country. The Lucky Ones is a unique memoir in English of this largest-ever massacre in independent India . It is also about a communal crisis bringing a fractured family together. A must-read in our warring world today. (July 16) — Jenny Bhatt

‘Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist’ by Jasmin Graham

Author Jasmin Graham is a marine biologist specializing in smalltooth sawfish and hammerhead sharks. Who are the real sharks in this story? Graham had to face the sharp-teethed truths of academia, while creating a world of curiosity and discovery around the complex lives of sharks. To combat the racism she encountered in academia, Graham created an “ocean of her own” to become an independent scientist and a champion of social justice, a journey she unspools in this new memoir. (July 16) — Martha Ann Toll

‘Liars’ by Sarah Manguso

I have long been a fan of Sarah Manguso’s crystalline prose, from her fragmented illness memoir The Two Kinds of Decay to her tightly constrained 2022 novel Very Cold People . Her second novel , Liars , marries restraint with rage — in it, Manguso traces the full arc of a 15-year relationship between Jane, a successful writer, and John, a dilettante artist-cum-techie, in aphoristic vignettes. The result is a furious, propulsive meditation on wifehood, motherhood and artistic ambition. (July 23) — Kristen Martin

‘The Horse: A Novel’ by Willy Vlautin

Musician and Lean on Pete author Willy Vlautin captures the American West like few other writers. His prose is always excellent, his characters always beautifully drawn, and that promises to be the case with his next novel, about an isolated Nevada man in his 60s who is visited by a blind horse that refuses to leave. (July 30) — Michael Schaub

‘Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe’ by Ken Krimstein

Art and science collide in Ken Krimstein’s new graphic biography . In this book, the author of the brilliant and whimsical The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt similarly translates careful research into scenic, emotive comics — in this case tracking the potential effects of an adventitious meeting in Prague between two geniuses on the cusp of world-changing discoveries. (Aug. 20) — Tahneer Oksman

‘Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde’ by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I’d probably be interested in a new biography of Audre Lorde if it focused on the eating habits of the brilliant thinker, poet, feminist and activist. But biographer Alexis Pauline Gumbs promises to more than exceed that bar. An award-winning poet, writer, feminist and activist in her own right, Gumbs is among the first researchers to delve into Lorde’s manuscript archives. The resulting book highlights the late author’s commitment to interrogating what it means to survive on this planet — and how Lorde’s radical understanding of ecology can guide us today. (Aug. 20) — Ericka Taylor

‘Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases’ by Maia Lee-Chin, illustrated by Marta Bertello

To those claiming Latin is dead, I say res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself — in children’s cartoons , Hollywood cartoons and enduring epics . As a fan of both Mr. Peabody and the Muses, the idea of combining Maia Lee-Chin’s thoughtful scholarship and Marta Bertello’s dynamic artistry is captivating. Their new book reimagines the world of Latin’s invention and tops my summer reading list. (Aug. 27) — Marcela Davison Avilés

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15 best movies like where the crawdads sing.

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Where The Crawdads Sings: 10 Movies and TV Shows Where You've Seen The Cast Before

The little things: all the evidence [spoiler] wasn't the killer, what happened to noriko in godzilla minus one.

• Where the Crawdads Sing offers a unique blend of drama, romance, and mystery in a historical Southern setting.
• The film has a one-of-a-kind storyline with popular appeal despite mixed reviews from critics.
• Leading performances and character-driven plot twists keep the audience engaged in this captivating murder mystery.

In an era of sequels, reboots, and spinoffs, movies like Where the Crawdads Sing offer a nice respite from Hollywood blockbusters with their fascinating plots and stunning visuals. The 2022 film is set in the 1950s-60s American South and follows Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a young woman from the swamps of North Carolina who becomes embroiled in a mysterious murder. Blending drama, romance, and mystery into one story, Where the Crawdads Sing told a unique coming-of-age story with a historical backdrop. Based on Delia Owens' best-selling novel of the same name, the film managed to deftly balance a range of tones from intrigue to outright terror.

Though critics weren't sold on the film, Where the Crawdads Sing garnered an impressive audience response on Rotten Tomatoes, and it was clear that the one-of-a-kind story had popular appeal. The cast of Where the Crawdads Sing only served to elevate the material, and the character-driven narrative had enough twists and turns to keep things engaging throughout. While there was a distinct uniqueness to the movie's plot and visual execution, plenty of movies like Where the Crawdads Sing have dotted the cinematic landscape and tell their own tales of dramatic mystery.

The upcoming film Where the Crawdads Sing features an ensemble cast who appeared in fascinating TV shows and movies like Normal People.

15 Snow Falling On Cedars (1999)

A japanese american man is accused of murder.

Long before movies like Where the Crawdads Sing were popular, Snow Falling on Cedars , based on the award-winning David Guterson novel of the same name, dealt with similar themes. Set in the Pacific Northwest in 1950, the story follows a Japanese American fisherman who is put on trial for the murder of his neighbor. Like Kya, Kabuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune) is treated as lesser than by his peers , and the movie tackles tough topics like racism in post-war America.

At the center of the courtroom drama is also a sweeping romance with Ethan Hawke as a reporter looking into the case surrounding Kabuo who also had a romance in the past with Kabuo's wife. The foggy environs of Puget Sound offer a stark visual contrast to the swamps of North Carolina, but the eerie tone is present throughout the forgotten '90s thriller.

14 Knives Out (2019)

Benoit blanc investigates a family murder.

Making the murder mystery movie popular again, Knives Out launched a brand-new cinematic franchise. After a famous novelist is murdered, detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) investigates the writer's shady family who all have sinister motives.

Knives Out features several of the same themes as Where the Crawdads Sing, most importantly the murder mystery.

Among the various colorful characters of the family, the writer's nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) is revealed to know more about the case than she is letting on. Knives Out features several of the same themes as Where the Crawdads Sing, most importantly the murder mystery. Both movies keep the viewer in the dark until the final reveal .

Unlike Where the Crawdads Sing , Knives Out uses humor to get its point across, making the murder mystery less scary and more playful. It also features a wonderful supporting cast that includes Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Shannon. It spawned a sequel, Glass Onion , with a third Benoit Blanc mystery on the way.

13 Murder On The Orient Express (2017)

Hercule poirot investigates a death on a train, murder on the orient express.

Adapted from the best-selling Agatha Christie book , Murder on the Orient Express revived the classic novel with a modern cinematic flare. Detective Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) investigates a grisly murder aboard the world-famous trans-continental train.

When one of the passengers is found dead during the commute, it becomes obvious another passenger is responsible with the brilliant detective searching through the many motivations. It is another star-studded mystery with the likes of Johnny Depp, Olivia Coleman, Daisy Ridley, Willem Dafoe, and others.

As with most movies like Where The Crawdads Sing, Murder on the Orient Expres s dedicates itself to its mystery and doesn't get sidetracked by much else . Slowly but surely, information is revealed, which has the viewers desperately trying to piece together what really happened. Though a bit more procedural than Where the Crawdads Sing , the Branagh-directed adaptation nevertheless finds a way to be shocking in its own right.

12 Marrowbone (2017)

Siblings cover up their mother's death.

Though Where the Crawdads Sing mixed in subtle horror elements, the psychological thriller Marrowbone embraces the horrific much more openly. In 1960s Maine, the mysterious Marrowbone family must cover up the death of their mother in order to retain ownership of the family estate.

However, their secrets soon give way to something more sinister as they are haunted by an unknown presence in the massive manor. Notable stars like Mia Goth, Anya Taylor-Joy, and George MacKay make up the cast, and the young stars are reminiscent of Where the Crawdads Sing 's ensemble.

Though a supernatural horror story, Marrowbone also subtly ratchets up the tension, and the picturesque period locations are as visually stunning as those in Where the Crawdads Sing . It makes for an effective setting to deliver the scares and craft an intriguing mystery.

11 Lost Girls (2020)

Amy ryan searches for her missing daughter, lost girls (2020).

Women-centric true-crime stories are abundant, but the film Lost Girls used the real-life narrative from Robert Kolker's book to explore failures in the criminal justice system. Oscar nominee Amy Ryan stars as Mari Gilbert whose daughter goes missing.

After the police fail to uncover anything she takes it upon herself to find her child and stumbles across multiple unsolved murders of women. Lost Girls focuses on the importance of unsolved crimes , especially those involving women and sex workers.

It makes for a powerful story within the intriguing mystery in which more is revealed as Mari continues to peel back the layers. While darker than Where The Crawdads Sing, the same themes are present including, murder, betrayal, and the hunt for the truth in the face of impossible odds . Lost Girls is equal parts haunting and jaw-dropping.

10 The Girl On The Train (2016)

Emily blunt becomes obsessed with strangers, the girl on the train.

Much like how Where the Crawdads Sing was fast-tracked to the big screen after the success of the novel, The Girl on the Train brought Paula Hawkins' best-selling novel to life. Emily Blunt stars in the adaptation as Rachel, a woman who sees the same couple as she passes their home during her daily train commute. However, when she witnesses something in one of these communities, she is pulled into a dark and twisting mystery.

Both movies are spearheaded by strong female leads and focus on the importance of finding the truth, no matter the consequences.

The Girl on the Train 's greatest strength is its building eeriness, which makes it akin to Where the Crawdads Sing in tone . It also focuses mostly on Rachel instead of an ensemble cast, much like Kya and her own journey and self-discovery. Both movies are spearheaded by strong female leads and focus on the importance of finding the truth, no matter the consequences.

9 The Little Things (2021)

Denzel washington and rami malek investigate a serial killer, the little things.

Though Where the Crawdads Sing used its rural setting as a perfect backdrop, 2021's The Little Things showed that urban environments were still ripe for a gripping thriller story. While in Los Angeles on an evidence-gathering mission, a veteran cop (Denzel Washington) finds himself assisting in the hunt for a vicious serial killer. When he and the younger detective (Rami Maleck) zero in on a suspect (Jared Leto), the frustration over closing the case begins to push them to dark places.

While The Little Things focuses on the bureaucratic procedures of big city policing, it has the same undertones as Where The Crawdads Sing. There's an ominous feeling as the case continues to escalate , and there is a claustrophobic vibe as the city closes in. Uncomfortable to watch, the twists continue up into the film's last moments.

In The Little Things, Deacon & Baxter narrow down the prime suspect through a long string of circumstantial evidence. Here's why he isn't the killer.

8 Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil (1997)

A murder mystery in the heart of new orleans' upper society.

John Berendt's landmark true-crime book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil captured the Southern Gothic essences of Savannah Georgia, and the film mimicked its style excellently. A young journalist (John Cusack) travels to Savannah to cover the city's annual Christmas festivities and submerges himself in the town's culture and true crime.

When a popular and wealthy local (Kevin Spacey) is accused of murder, it becomes clear there are some dark truths to be revealed. Movies like Where the Crawdads Sing often rely on contrived fictional situations to get their message across, but Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil used true stories to offer its twisted story.

Ranging from strangely humorous to nightmarish and grisly, the two films overlap in their tones and Southern Gothic visual style . Director Clint Eastwood does a terrific job of creating a unique and entertaining community in which the story evolves.

7 The Woman In The Window (2021)

Amy adams witnesses a murder, the woman in the window.

A.J. Finn's novel The Woman in the Window was ripe for adaptation, and it joined a growing roster of movies like Where the Crawdads Sing that analyze crime from the female perspective. Anna (Amy Adams) is a woman with agoraphobia living an isolated life in her apartment.

Anna attempts to uncover the truth which leads to her questioning her own sanity.

After she believes she witnessed a murder in the house across the street, Anna attempts to uncover the truth which leads to her questioning her own sanity. Like Where The Crawdads Sing, the strong performances in The Woman in the Window are its anchor with a strong cast that includes Julianne Moore, Brian Tyree Henry, Wyatt Russell, and Gary Oldman.

Both Kya and Anna are outcasts watching the rest of the world from the sidelines , horrified at what they witness but desperate to piece together the truth of what they've seen.

6 George Washington (2000)

A group of young friends face a tragedy together.

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of Where the Crawdads Sing is its coming-of-age elements, and the indie darling George Washington tackled similar ideas. Set in rural North Carolina, a tight-knit group of young kids is shattered when one of their own is accidentally killed and they decide to cover it up. As they deal with the aftermath, it sends them on their own paths of redemption.

Though not nearly as cinematic as the big-budgeted Where the Crawdads Sing , George Washington uses its rural Southern backdrop as the perfect stage for coming-of-age drama . Both films deal with underserved youth and tackle the tragic consequences of mistakes that get way out of hand, even if George Washington is much more realistic in its execution. Though he is now known for movies like Pineapple Express and the Halloween reboot movies , David Gordon Green made a stunning directorial debut with this movie.

5 Dark Places (2015)

Charlize theron revisits a family tragedy, dark places.

Author Gillian Flynn has become a popular source of content for movies and TV, with Gone Girl being her most iconic crime story. While Dark Places has never reached that level of popularity, it remains an absorbing thriller.

Decades after her family was brutally murdered and her brother was arrested for the crime, Libby (Charlize Theron) is forced to revisit the traumatic night of her family's murder when investigators reopen the case and start to ask hard questions.

Noted for featuring yet another strong female character from Flynn's oeuvre, Dark Places is full of twists and haunting revelations that have the viewer questioning the lengths people will go to in order to keep their secrets. Much like Where The Crawdads Sing, both movies are hauntingly dark and thrilling to watch with a particularly strong eye towards psychological chills .

4 Rebecca (2020)

Lily james looks into the past relationship of her new husband, rebecca (2020).

Though Where the Crawdads Sing is a modern mystery novel, it does share similarities to some older works of the genre that have received modern film adaptations. Based on the classic novel by Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca follows Mrs. de Winter, a new bride (Lily James) who moves into her husband's (Armie Hammer) estate but finds herself living in the shadow of his titular first wife. Mrs. de Winter begins to question not only her husband but herself, as she's haunted by her predecessor's legacy.

Serving as the blueprint for movies like Where the Crawdads Sing , du Maurier's tale has a lot to say about marriage from the female perspective. Though the 2020 adaptation of Rebecca changed things from the novel , it maintained the haunting atmosphere that makes it a perfect companion to Where the Crawdads Sing .

3 Beloved (1998)

Oprah winfrey is haunted by the memory of her child, beloved (1998).

Finally bringing Toni Morrison's masterpiece Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to life, Beloved is an allegorical take on many of the same themes covered in Where the Crawdads Sing . Sethe (Oprah Winfrey) is tortured by her past as a formerly enslaved person and haunted by the seeming reincarnation of her lost child, Beloved (Thandiwe Newton).

It forces her to grapple with her grief while also attempting to move on with her life. Directed by Oscar winner Jonathan Demme, Beloved is a complex movie that is not easy to categorize into one genre but hits certain similar beats as Where the Crawdads Sing .

Both films deal with characters who have been ostracized from society , and while Kya is symbolically haunted, Sethe is haunted in a more literal sense. Though Beloved is a largely forgotten box office bomb, it helped pave the way for movies like Where the Crawdads Sing .

2 A Mouthful Of Air (2021)

Amanda seyfried deals with childhood trauma, a mouthful of air.

The psychology of trauma was the heart of Amy Koppelman's novel, and the adaptation of A Mouthful of Air explored the same ideas. Julie Davis (Amanda Seyfried) is a bestselling children's author who writes encouraging stories to teach children to face their fears. However, when she faces the birth of her daughter, she realizes that she is still not facing some of the trauma of her own childhood.

One common thread dealt with in both movies is hidden and repressed childhood memories that won't go away . Kya of Where the Crawdads Sing buried much of her childhood in order to cope as an adult, similarly to Julie. Both women are confronted with their trauma and hidden pasts and must overcome them if they want to move forward, though Julie's journey isn't nearly as eerie as Kya's.

1 The Starling (2021)

Melissa mccarthy struggles with grief, the starling.

While the word "heartwarming" usually wouldn't be used to describe movies like Where the Crawdads Sing , 2021's The Starling fits that description. Following a tragic loss, Lily (Melissa McCarthy) deals with her husband being committed to a psychiatric facility. As she deals with him and ignores her own grief, she soon finds herself fighting and subsequently befriending a starling that has taken to nesting in her backyard.

The Starling focuses on the importance of reopening one's heart , as does Where The Crawdads Sing. Themes of love, acceptance, and grief are present in both films, but The Starling uses a subtle sense of humor to get its point across with none of the creepiness of Where the Crawdads Sing . It also features a solid dramatic role for McCarthy as well as a strong supporting cast, including Chris O'Dowd, Kevin Kline, and Timothy Olyphant.