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1. Where The Crawdads Sing Summary

According to the blurb, Where the Crawdads Sing should be “perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Karen Russell.” Also, it would be perfect for everyone who likes nature and detailed descriptions of it: after all, Delia Owens is a wildlife scientist by trade, and she manages to translate her passion in every single word of her debut novel.

1. Nov 12, 2018 - Delia Owens spent 10 years on her first novel, “Where the Crawdads Sing,” which has struck a chord with Reese Witherspoon and enough.
2. Fox 2000 has acquired the best-selling novel “Where the Crawdads Sing” and has tapped Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine to produce a feature film adaptation. Witherspoon’s involvement is.

Where the Crawdads Sing is a 2018 novel by Delia Owens.^[2] It has topped the The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2019 for 18 non-consecutive weeks.^[3] The story follows two timelines, slowly intertwining: the first describes the life and adventures of a young girl named Kya as she grows up isolated in the swamps of North Carolina through 1952-1969, and a murder investigation of Chase Andrews, a local celebrity of Barkley Cove, a fictional coastal town of North Carolina.^[2][4][5] The book was selected for Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine Book Club in September 2018^[6] and for Barnes & Noble's Best Books of 2018.^[7] By March 2019, the book reached 1.5 million copies sold.^[4]

Plot[edit]

Part I - The Marsh

In 1952, Catherine Danielle Clark (nicknamed 'Kya') watches her mother abandon her and her family. While Kya waits in vain for her return, she witnesses her older siblings, Missy, Murph, Mandy, and eventually Jodie, all leave as well, due to their Pa's drinking and physical abuse.

After she is left alone with Pa, he temporarily stops drinking and teaches her to fish and gives her his knapsack to hold her collections of shells and feathers. Unable to read and write, Kya relies on painting with her Ma's old watercolors the birds or shores where she found the items.

When Kya finds a letter she recognizes as having been sent from Ma on the table for Pa to find, he burns the letter as well as most of Ma's wardrobe and canvases. He returns to drinking and takes long, frequent trips away to gamble. Eventually, he doesn't return at all and Kya assumes him dead, making him the last of the family to leave her alone in the marsh. Without money and family, she learns self-reliance, including gardening and trading fresh mussels and smoked fish for money and gas from Jumpin', a black man who owns a gas shop for boats. Jumpin' becomes a good friend to her, even enlisting his wife, Mabel, to collect donated clothing to fit Kya.

As Kya grows up, she faces prejudice from the townspeople of Barkley Cove, who nickname her 'The Marsh Girl.' She is laughed at by the schoolchildren the only day she goes to school and called 'nasty' and 'filthy' by the pastor's wife. However, she makes a friend in Tate Walker, an old friend of Jodie's, who sometimes fishes in the marsh. When she gets lost one day, he leads her home in his boat. Years later, he leaves her feathers from rare birds, then teaches her how to read and speak. The two form a romantic, yet platonic, relationship until Tate leaves for college. He realizes the Kya cannot live in his more civilized world because of how wild and independent she is, and leaves her without saying goodbye.

Part II - The Swamp

Years later, in 1965, Chase Andrews, Barkley Cove's star quarterback and playboy, invites Kya to picnic, during which he tries to have sex with her. He later apologizes, and the two form romantic relationship. He shows her an abandoned fire tower and she gives him a necklace of a shell he found during their picnic strung on rawhide. Despite her suspicions, she believes Chase's promises of marriage and consummates their relationship in a cheap motel room. After shopping for groceries one day, she reads in the paper of his engagement to another woman, and realizes that his promises of marriage were a ruse for sex. She ends their relationship.

Tate, having graduated from college, visits Kya and is impressed by her expanded collection. He urges her to publish a reference book on seashells, and she does so under her full name. Jodie also returns in her life, expressing regret that he left her alone and breaking the news of their mother's death two years prior. Kya forgives her mother for leaving, but still cannot understand why she never returned.

Kya is offered to meet her publisher in Greenville, North Carolina. While she is away, Chase is found dead beneath the fire tower. The sheriff, Ed, believes it to be a murder on the basis of there being no tracks or fingerprints, including Chase's, around the tower. Ed speaks with a couple citizens and receives contradictory statements. The shell necklace the Kya gave to Chase was missing when his body was found, even though he wore it the night before. Kya was seen leaving Barkley Cove before the murder, then returning the day after, but was also seen speeding her boat toward the tower the night Chase died. There were also red wool fibers on Chase's jacket that belonged to a hat of Kya's. Convinced she is the culprit, Ed traps Kya near Jumpin's wharf and jails her for two months.

At Kya's trial, contradictory testimonies are given. Kya's lawyer, Tom, debunks prosecuting arguments on the basis that there is no concrete evidence to convict Kya. The jury finds her not guilty. Kya returns home and reconciles with Tate. They live together until when Kya is 65, she passes away peacefully in her boat. Tate find a hidden box of her old things and realizes that Kya wrote poems as Amanda Hamilton, the poet she frequently recites throughout the book. Tate also finds, underneath the poems, the shell necklace Chase wore until he died.

Ethology in the novel[edit]

Ethology, the study of animal behaviour, appears in the wildlife scientist Delia Owens's 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing. Kya reads about ethology including an article entitled 'Sneaky Fuckers', using her knowledge to navigate the tricks and dating rituals of the local boys; and she compares herself to a female firefly, who uses her coded flashing light signal to lure a male of another species to his death, or a female mantis, who starts eating her mate's head and thorax while his abdomen is still copulating with her. 'Female insects, Kya thought, know how to deal with their lovers.'^[8][9]

References[edit]

1. ^Jordan, Tina (29 March 2019). 'The Debut Novel That Rules the Best-Seller List' – via NYTimes.com.
2. ^ ^abGrey, Tobias (2018-11-12). 'With 'Where the Crawdads Sing,' a Debut Novel Goes Big'. Wall Street Journal. ISSN0099-9660. Retrieved 2019-04-05.
3. ^'Combined Print & E-Book Fiction, Bestsellers'. New York Times. 2019.
4. ^ ^abJordan, Tina (2019-03-29). 'The Debut Novel That Rules the Best-Seller List'. The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-04-05.
5. ^'Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens review – in the swamps of North Carolina Books The Guardian'. web.archive.org. 2019-04-05. Retrieved 2019-04-05.
6. ^'Hello Sunshine'. Hello Sunshine. Retrieved 2019-06-23.
7. ^Noble, Barnes &. 'Barnes & Noble's Best Books of 2018, Best Books of the Year 2018, Books'. Barnes & Noble. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
8. ^Lawson, Mark (12 January 2019). 'Fiction A US bestseller, this debut about a nature-loving girl growing up alone in southern swampland has wide appeal'. The Guardian. Retrieved 13 January 2019.
9. ^Owens, Delia (2018). Where the Crawdads Sing. Corsair. pp. 183, 274. ISBN978-0-7352-1909-0.

Further reading[edit]

Stasio, Marilyn (2018-08-17). 'From a Marsh to a Mountain, Crime Fiction Heads Outdoors'. The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-04-05.

Where The Crawdads Sing Summary