In her mystery with a romance subplot novel Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens explores

how you should not judge people based on the fact that they are different from you, whether it be
the colour of your skin, the place you grew up, or your ability to read. It is a book for young
adults to help them deal with the pressures and the changes in their life and to help people realize
they are not alone in their loneliness. If Kya hadn't been judged by the townsfolk from a young
age maybe she would have come to school and learned to read earlier, if they had given her food
and taken her in then she wouldn't have felt so alone and wouldn't have been so cut off from
society. If she hadn't already been judged by the townsfolk maybe she would have reported
Chase's assault and he would have ended up in jail.

Delia Owens uses some codes and conventions well and others are mediocre at times. The
structure for one has both negative and positive parts. In the title of the book, we are in a way
presenting Kya compared to the rest of the town. It refers to "far in the bush where the critters
are wild still behaving like critters" it is the wildest parts of the marsh like how kya is the wildest
inhibitor of Barkley Cove. . She is the dangerous march girl "hooting and hollering with relief
that they had survived the Marsh Girl, the Wolf Child, the girl who couldn't spell dog. Their
words and laughter carried back to her through the forest as they disappeared into the night, back
to safety. She watched the relit candles, bobbing through the trees. Then sat staring into the
stone-quiet darkness. Shamed (91)". One of my favourite parts of the book was the flashbacks
and flash-forwards. I especially like some of the foreshadowings including how when Kya first
observes the female fireflies luring the males and then eating them. This was when I knew Kya
was going to kill Chase since it essentially is Chase and Kya's relationship the male-only want
the female to mate. A good part of the book focused on the theme of abandonment. Kya is left
from a very young age by her mother, then her siblings. Kya does not understand why her
mother was left alone without so much as a goodbye and she spends a lot of the book trying to
piece together why. She reads her mom's poetry finding comfort in the words "Kya touched the
words as if they were a message, as though Ma had underlined them specifically so her daughter
would read them someday by this dim kerosene flame and understand. It wasn't much, not a
handwritten note tucked in the back of a sock drawer, but it was something. She sensed that the
words clinched a powerful meaning, but she couldn't shake it free. If she ever became a poet,
she'd make the message clear." She watches the wildlife and reads books on creatures while
observing how mothers treat their kin "Within all the worlds of biology, she searched for an
explanation of why a mother would leave her offspring ". Another important theme is prejudice.
The people of the town assume the worse of Kya just because she is different and lives in the
march, they knock on her door hollering at her to be able to brag about surviving (91). They
assume she killed Chase before there was any evidence because she is dangerous and wild to
them. When kya visits a coloured town, she sees a group of boys harass and mock jumpin',
calling him slurs and throwing stones at his back (101), she witnesses the racism the thrown has,
in a way Kya is similar to jumpin' as people assume the worst of them because of things they
cannot control. Prejudice is engraved in the town and Tom says it best in his closing statements
(340)"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I grew up in Barkley Cove, and when I was a younger
man I heard the tall tales about the Marsh Girl. Yes, let's just get this out in the open. We called
her the Marsh Girl. Many still call her that. Some people whispered that she was a part wolf or
the missing link between ape and man. That her eyes glowed in the dark. Yet in reality, she was
only an abandoned child, a little girl surviving on her own in a swamp, hungry and cold, but we
didn't help her. Except for one of her only friends, Jumpin', not one of our churches or
community groups offered her food or clothes. Instead, we labelled and rejected her because we
thought she was different. But, ladies and gentlemen, did we exclude Miss Clark because she
was different, or was she different because we excluded her? If we had taken her in as one of our
own I think that is what she would be today. If we had fed, clothed, and loved her, invited her
into our churches and homes, we wouldn't be prejudiced against her. And I believe she would not
be sitting here today accused of a crime. (304)"

There are many connections to be made with the book but my favourite would have to be The
folklore love triangle. It's the story of James, his girlfriend Betty, and the girl he cheated on her
with named Augustine. In the book James would be Chase, Betty would be pearl and Kya would
be Augustine. Augustine is the wild girl, the bad girl, on the surface someone who doesn't listen
to the rules, but digging deeper she is lonely, she craves affection, she wants to be the first
choice, a girl to have forever instead of a summer fling. Kya is the marsh girl, a monster child, a
wildling of sorts. She is perceived by the town as an uneducated, dirty and lowly girl. She is wild
and dangerous to them which is why "Sneaking out to her shack, running through the dark and
tagging it, had become a regular tradition, an initiation for boys becoming men." Yet somehow
become an object of desire "Some of them were already making bets about who would be the
first to get her cherry." Like Augustine, Kya is lonely; she was left as a child, so when Chase
approaches her, she knows it won't end well but persists anyway. She wants something to ease
the pain of her loneliness. Chase tells her he loves her, says he will marry her and they will have
children and live a happy life together. "To live for the hope of it, all cancel plans just in case
you called (august, Taylor swift)" Augustines know this won't end well but there's still hope,
hope that kya has too that maybe they can end up together. Kya doesn't love Chase but she does
love what Chase could give her, she loves the idea of having a family, and friends "she knew it
wasn't Chase she mourned but a life defined by rejections." Kya loves the idea of not being alone
but in the end, the chase was " never mine to lose (august Taylor swift)".

Kya's journey of finding her strength and defending herself against chase reminded me of one of
my favourite book characters Lana Myer. At a very young age, both Lana and Kya lost their
mothers, Lana was in a car accident and Kya's mother left her and eventually passed from the
heartbreak. At the age of 14, Lana's father was falsely accused of murder and then killed in the
prison of their small town and Kya's father abandons her one day. Both characters were very
close with their brothers and both lost them though Kya saw Jodie again and Lana's brother sadly
passed away. But the thing that does bring them together is the fact that both women killed their
assaulters. While Lana and Kya's sexual assaults are very different what happened to Lana may
honestly be the most disgusting backstory to a fictional character I have ever read. Lana at age 15
with her brother was tied to a street in her town with chains, and raped, reputedly by various
deferent men of the town, they also severely beat the two of them and stabbed them. Lana barely
survived and her injuries were so bad they had to take out her uterus for her to be able to survive.
Her brother died. So she took revenge. She got plastic surgery and then brutally murdered every
man who hurt her and took revenge by terrorizing the town who helped cover up everything that
happened to her. Kya killed Chase after he assaulted her. Both these characters are good for her
girls, they committed murder, got away with it, and I couldn't be happier about it.
In my opinion Where The Crawdads sing was fine. I think there are incredible aspects of the
book but some parts were so incredibly dull that it brings down my opinion of the book as a
whole. For example, I enjoyed Kya's journey with herself and her loneliness. I find that aspect to
be the most powerful part of the book, most of my favourite quotes were from those sections.
When Kya sees the group of kids her age and observes the girls she thinks "Their squeals made
Kya's silence even louder. Their togetherness tugged at her loneliness, but she knew being
labelled as marsh trash kept her behind the oak tree." This quote is so important as it displayed
how lonely kya was and how her being the marsh girl built up walls around her that no matter
how hard she tried she could not climb over. She was utterly and completely alone "The lonely
became larger than she could hold."Something I did not enjoy was the beginning of the book, I
found it almost unbearable to read. I was falling asleep, but thankfully after page 100 the book
got interesting and after that I enjoyed it.2