WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING

Kya Clark lives with her family in a shack in the North Carolina marshes until her siblings and parents leave one by one and she is left at the age of 7 to raise herself. Abandoned to this solitary life with just herons and gulls for company she learns to cook, grow vegetables and eek out a living, but she has few friends and shuns society. Some years later a handsome young man is murdered and The Marsh Girl is the obvious suspect. Unfolding slowly in dual timelines, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is an immersive and captivating summer read.

At some level she understands why first her mother, then her siblings leave: her alcoholic, abusive father. But what she can’t understand is why her mother never comes back to get her (animals never abandon their young). This deep loneliness and pain shapes her life, while at the same time the marsh and the wildlife become not just her friends and family but also her sustaining purpose.