14. Where the Crawdads Sing

By Delia Owens   

My company has been WFH since March.  Slack was the predominant mode of communication, and since the pandemic, it has become THE primary mode.  The number of channels to choose from is dizzying.  For months, I had been lurking in the women’s local book club channel until September when they finally picked a book I was interested in -- Where the Crawdads Sing, but the person announced it in a bizarre way:

Myself along with the --- committee have chosen our read. We decided to be inline with ----'s initiative of Culture and Belonging and wanted to amplify the voices of BIPOC authors and their stories. So I am super happy to announce that we will be collectively reading "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens!

At first, I was like, yay, perfect timing, I’m been noticing the lack of authors of colour in my own reading, but when I googled Delia Owens, I saw that she was like, white....?  So I responded with interest and mentioned that the author wasn't exactly BIPOC...?  The announcer apologized, acknowledged her mistake and said she meant "BIPOC characters and their stories" and corrected her original post.  But I'm like wait a sec... are there even ANY BIPOC characters in Where the Crawdads Sing cuz I don't think the protagonist is even black???   But no one else said anything, and soon enough in mid-October, a hardcover copy was delivered to my home via Amazon. 

As suspected, all the major characters are white.  The only black people were parental figures for the heroine, thus, merely serving as tertiary characters in the story.  Yikes.  Sometimes it’s better to not bring attention to an attempt at diversity and representation when there is an utter lack of understanding of what that really means!   And again, nobody else commented on the oversight, but for myself, it was a rather glaring blind spot. 

So I started reading kind of biased against the book.  It didn’t help that the first half was fairly tropish and unoriginal.  I enjoy stories about outcasts living on the fringes of society, and Where the Crawdads Sing seemed to promise a kind of Americanized version of Island of the Blue Dolphins.  But the novel started awkwardly with the Sheriff and his deputy investigating a dead body in the marshes.  They were completely two-dimensional.  Kya’s own family members were drawn like any caricature that has graced American gothic-type classics like To Kill a Mockingbird.  And then there were the more ‘high-minded’ folks like Kya’s future love interest, Tate.  He and his fisherman father were different from other townsfolk cuz they read poetry out loud to each other in the evening.  They, like Kya, were Sensitive People.  Boy, I winced.  A lot. 

WtCS did not offer any deep insights into the racial politics of North Carolina during the 1960’s either, completely counter to what the book club organizer promised.   The only insight was Kya’s status in society; she was considered white trash by the townsfolk and therefore, no better than her black foster parents, Jumpin’ and Mabel.  IMHO, it would have been far more interesting had Kya’s character was black, but then, Where the Crawdads Sing would not have been such a successful bestseller.   It’s not the author’s fault, it was just how this novel was presented to the book club that rubbed me the wrong way.

Thankfully, after I made it past the second half, the writing improved significantly.  After Kya was abandoned by her family, she survived on her own living in the ramshackle hut out in the middle of nowhere by a marsh near the shore.  There were lovely passages describing the natural beauty of the surrounding areas of Kya’s home.  As she grew older, Tate would tutor and mentor her, as he was on his way to becoming a budding scientist.  Kya becomes a gifted autodidact, applying what she learned from books to the natural world around her.  So as her mind grew and improved, so did Owen’s writing.  The author is foremost a wildlife scientist and nature writer, so the nature writing was where WtCS really shone. 

The passages where Kya observes the mating rituals of fireflies and compares them to her own life experience were also favourites.

…the second male was convinced he’d found a wiling female of his own kind and hovered above her to mate.  But suddenly the female firefly reached up, grabbed him with her mouth, and ate him, chewing all six legs and both wings.

      Kya watched the others.  The females got what they wanted—first a mate; then a meal—just by changing their signals.

      Kya knew judgement had no place here.  Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light.

Females choose to mate with imposing alphas, while stunted males have no choice but to become pumped up and deceptive “sneaky fuckers”, grabbing a copulation here and there. 

Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on.  She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.

Unfortunately, Kya learned the hard way that human males are not much better than their counterparts in the animal kingdom.  Like a woman scorned, she becomes hardened and cynical.  And soon enough, the dead body at the start of the novel comes full circle and catches up to our heroine.

As a murder-mystery, Owens relied heavily on the unreliable narrator device and conveniently left out key information that would aid in the surprise twist at the end.  There was a court scene that was glossed over quickly.  Basically, there was minimal evidence versus witness testimonials to Kya’s character.   I was fine with this.  And the ending was satisfying in that it fit with the character and narrative arc.

In short, WtCS  wasn’t a great book, but it was engaging and well-written enough and thus, perfect for a generic book club.  Most of the women enjoy sweeping, intriguey historical fiction like Stolen Beauty and Philippa Gregory, and perhaps the most substantial book that has been picked so far has been Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. 

The book club meeting was pleasant.  I think there were around 18 people in total, so the organizers set up smaller breakout zoom sessions of randomly chosen people.   Interestingly there were 2 other Asian women and a black woman in my breakout session.   They all really loved the book.  The discussion questions were thought-provoking enough but not particularly challenging.  Our discussion was pleasant, but safe.  Again, I felt I was the only person who wanted to question whether Where the Crawdads Sing was a valid “diversity” choice so I didn’t bring it up.  But after we finished all the discussion questions, I raised one challenging question to my group:  if Kya was black instead of white, would she have literally “gotten away with murder”?   A big no.

One woman loved how fiercely independent Kya was and wondered if there was any famous real life counterpart who was almost entirely self-taught.

The answer only occurred to me long afterwards, but there is such a person, and it's Jane Goodall!

When she started studying chimpanzees in Africa, she only had secretarial training and no formal scientific training at all.  Louis Leakey hired Goodall because he wanted someone who was free of academic bias, but also she had amazingly keen observational skills, self taught knowledge about nature and the ability to spend long periods of time on her own... not unlike the heroine from Where the Crawdads Sing.

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P.S. I was going to see if our neighbourhood used book store S.W. Welch would be interested in my stack of books, and he has rejected both hardcopies of 'Robopocalypse' and 'Where the Crawdads Sing'!