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Where The Crawdads Sing
597
Setting
Where The Crawdads Sing
By Delia Owens
Belmont Village Book Series
Setting:
1950s-present day,
North Carolina marshland
https://youtu.be/qq5NWgSa0iA
From the publisher:
Synopsis
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.
Characters
- Kya: "The Marsh Girl," abandoned by her family and left to fend for herself from a young age, considered "swamp trash" by the locals
- Kya's family: Kya was the youngest of a large family that dissipated after Mama walked out
- Tate: a friend of Kya's big brother, Jodie; her first friend and one true love
- Chase: the handsome quarterback that starts coming around when Kya becomes a teenager; his body is the one at the center of the murder investigation that drives the story.
- Jumpin' + Mabel: the African-American couple whose kindness keeps Kya alive during the leanest times.
Quotes:
“I wasn't aware that words could hold so much. I didn't know a sentence could be so full.”
Quotes
On Tate:
“His dad had told him many times that the definition of a real man is one who cries without shame, reads poetry with his heart, feels opera in his soul, and does what’s necessary to defend a woman.”
On Kya, growing up alone:
“Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”
On companionship:
“Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. “Unworthy boys make a lot of noise,” Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone.”
On survival:
“In nature—out yonder where the crawdads sing—these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother’s number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive—way back yonder.”
On Love:
“Let’s face it, a lot of times love doesn’t work out. Yet even when it fails, it connects you to others and, in the end, that is all you have, the connections.”
Are our traits learned or biological?
Who do we discriminate against and why?
Questions
How do you decide who qualifies as family?
Do they have to be related to you?
Does human society follow similar rules as the natural world? Should it?