Where the Crawdads Sing Add a review

Where the Crawdads Sing is a 2018 coming-of-age murder mystery novel by American zoologist Delia Owens. The story follows two timelines that slowly intertwine. The first timeline describes the life and adventures of a young girl named Kya as she grows up isolated in the marshes of North Carolina. The second timeline follows an investigation into the apparent murder of Chase Andrews, a local celebrity of Barkley Cove, a fictional coastal town of North Carolina. By April 2023, the book had sold over 18 million copies. A film adaptation was released in July 2022.

Scholars have commented on the novel from the perspective of ecocriticism, and on its depiction of the American South as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Owens's profession, the study of animal behavior, provides material for the book, the violence and deception in nature serving as metaphors for how the men in the story behave towards Kya. Critics have noted that Owens's involvement in a murder in Zambia, too, is reflected in the plot.