2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
COURTSESY OF THE ARTIST
142
YEARNING OVER YONDER a review by Susannah Hedley Delia Owens. Where the Crawdads Sing: A Novel. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018.
SUSANNAH HEDLEY, originally from Elizabeth City, NC, is currently enrolled at NC State University, where she is earning her master’s in English with a concentration in Film Studies. She received her BA in English from East Carolina University and is a former NCLR intern. DELIA OWENS is the co-author of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books, published by Houghton Mifflin, about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa: Cry of the Kalahari (1984), The Eye of the Elephant (1992), and Secrets of the Savanna (2006). She has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing and has been published in Nature, The African Journal of Ecology, and many others. She lives in Idaho.
In 1952, Kya’s morning begins with abandonment. At six years old, she watches her mother’s retreating figure, blue suitcase in hand, leaving Kya and her four older siblings to fend for themselves against an abusive and negligent father. Without Ma’s stable warmth and affection diffused throughout their battered shack on the North Carolina coastal marsh, the only home Kya knows becomes unfamiliar. And once her mother departs down the lane without a backward glance, it doesn’t take long for Kya’s siblings to follow suit, until the only person she has left is her father, an unreliable man who is either drunk or absent and who eventually leaves, too. Here begins Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing, a novel about a young girl who learns to navigate this land and her childhood alone, though right outside of Barkley Cove, a small town feeding into the Atlantic Ocean. Kya rarely ventures into town, but on the few occasions that she does, she braces herself for ridicule; the Barkley Cove townspeople see
Kya as the feral Other, whom they vehemently try to avoid. When they bother acknowledging her, they tend to employ the cruel moniker “Marsh Girl.” To Barkley Cove, Kya isn’t viewed as a child to be helped but as an unwelcome spectacle, better suited for the swamp she emerges from. Left on her own, Kya takes refuge in her only constant, the marsh, which becomes a main character in this story. The comfort of its sheltering trees, salty air, green lagoons, and sweeps of grass eagerly stand in as Kya’s family, haven, and dearest friend, especially when her human relationships seem heartbreakly transient. Exposed at a young age to how unreliable other people can be, Kya, instead, looks to the ground beneath her feet for solace: she “laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother” (34). Still, Kya needs most what she has the least of. Having been sentenced to the periphery of this small town, she desperately yearns to be known and loved,
ABOVE Placid, 2009, from the Bald Head Island series, by Marjorie Pierson (See more of
her work in NCLR 2018, NCLR Online 2020 and read about her on her website.)