Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Do you ever hear about a thing that is really hyped and everyone tells you that you have to read/listen/watch it and you just don't want to because you're just resistant to peer pressure?  That was me with Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. But I gave in. And everyone was right.

This book was great.

The main character, Kya, is left alone in the marsh as a child. She raises herself, essentially, with help from a few friends here and there. At a certain point, there's a mysterious death and there's a puzzle to be worked out, but that's not the central arc of the story. It's really about how Kya survives amidst loneliness and palmetto bugs.

It's not original material. As I started reading it, I wondered if it were Before We Were Years because I could have sworn I'd read it before. The actual murder was not even particularly interesting if you've read novels about abused women before. The setting isn't that original - lots of mysterious things in happen in swamps and marshes.

But it's just beautiful. Owens takes the tropes and cliches and tired settings and revives them with new eyes. She writes about the natural world in a way that makes sense how a child and then a young woman would see it. She writes with truth about the feeling of absolute isolation and how a child and then a young woman would deal with it. Sure, there's a random mystery element to the novel, but it's really a coming of age story when the person involved doesn't have a clear model for how to age.  It's just magical.

It lives up to the hype. You should read it, even if it means waiting for two months for the hold to come through at the library.