“Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens, BS (Zoology), PhD (Animal Behavior): Poignant Tale of Abandoned Girl or Contrived Murder Mystery

I am halfway through this novel and have gone through two phases. At first, I was very sympathetic to the protagonist, Kya (Catherine Danielle Clark). I found it very poignant when, abandoned by everyone, she confides in a wild bird that it is her birthday. But the novel now also seems like a cynically contrived, murder mystery.

Kya is the youngest of five children, who live in a shack (no electricity or toilet) with their Ma and Pa in a North Carolina marsh. The father is an abusive, alcoholic, disabled WWII veteran. The four siblings, as soon as they are old enough, simply leave home to parts unknown, as does the mother, and the father eventually, too. But Kya continues to live in the shack, and is known to the nearest community—where she sometimes shops, but where she fails to attend school as she is supposed to—as the “marsh girl” or “marsh trash” (lowlife whites).

As I see it, no credible explanation has been given as to why Kya does not follow the example of everyone else in her family, and leave the shack in the marsh as soon as she can; nor why the regular community does not see her as an abandoned little girl, who must be either sent to some relative or put in foster care. Nor has it been explained why her siblings and mother abandoned her.

I’m beginning to think that the only thing in this novel that seems to matter is that Kya be seen as tear-jerkingly sympathetic, and that she will be a prime suspect in the apparent murder announced in the novel’s prologue: in short, a cynical, plot-driven, bestseller scenario.

Absence of Multiple Personality?

Although Kya would seem to be a prime candidate for posttraumatic symptoms, including multiple personality, I’m not sure I have seen any. She has no imaginary companion, personality switches, voices in her head, dissociative fugues, recurrent memory gaps, or any spirits in the marsh. She’s just not that type of person, as is also seen from the fact that when she learns to read, she favors biology textbooks, as opposed to novels.

So far, the only possible example of a multiple personality memory gap is this: “Kya couldn’t remember how to pray…from the little white church where Ma had taken her a few times…Their last visit had been Easter Sunday before Ma had left, but all Kya remembered about the holiday was shouting and blood, somebody falling, she and Ma running, so she dropped the memory altogether” (1, p. 70).

1. Delia Owens. Where the Crawdads Sing. New York, Putnam Penguin, 2018.