Why are we so scared of what is different?

We judge. We shun. We shut out. We close our minds to what we don’t understand but yet we could learn so much from someone who leads a life in an unorthodox way or thinks differently than us.

Kya is the pariah of the marshes of the North Carolina Bayou. Forced to raise herself when her family leaves her alone in a shack near the bayou and she must learn the art of human survival. The entire town doesn’t rush to help her but instead believes the absolute worst of her, and outside of a fisherman’s wharf style shop near the bayou, she learns to survive one pot of grits at a time.

The plot and character cadence reminded me of a Bayou version of Little House on the Prairie at first, but unlike Laura Ingalls, Kya’s closest friends are the beachside seagulls.

My favorite aspects of this story were how the author chose to entwine nature and poetry throughout which kept me reading, along with this heart-wrenching pull in my soul to see Kya grow stronger and stronger as the pages turned.

It reads like a good murder mystery but with the strong emotive pull of poetic prose, with a love against all odds storyline thrown in. The descriptions of the marshlands were my favorite and spoke to the author’s background in Zoology and Animal Behavior.

The moral of Where The Crawdads Sing to me is not to use one aspect of someone’s identity to box them in or come to conclusions about them. There is treasure -curious humans that we are- hidden in the depths. The depths of the Bayou, the depths of a poem, and the depths of any human soul.

Sometimes you must dare to venture forth an uncharted path to find the treasures of life, even precious human life.

This review was written for no compensation and is originally written in response to the reading of Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. If you enjoyed this review, feel free to buy me a coffee.