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Introduction
Before publishing her debut novel Where the Crawdads Sing (2018), Delia Owens wrote three non-fiction books on her experience as a wildlife scientist in Africa ("About the Author").1 Owens's professional knowledge as a biologist and nature writer certainly inspired Where the Crawdads Sing and allowed the author to adopt a profound ecocritical perspective on Southern wetlands. The novel not only explains the ecological properties of the North Carolina marsh, but also takes the reader on a journey to discover the animals that inhabit this unique environment, including their survival strategies. Where the Crawdads Sing portrays the Southern wetlands as a complex interdependent and fragile liminal environment between water and land, between humans and non-humans, and between life and death.
The novel is set in the wetlands of the North Carolina coast, in the racially segregated and class-conscious South of the 1950s and 1960s. A third-person narrator tells the story of protagonist Kya Clark, a white girl who grows up alone in the marsh and is known to the predominantly white community of the nearby fictional town of Barkley Cove as the "Marsh Girl" (91). The story begins with the discovery of the dead body of local football star and highly esteemed member of Barkley Cove, Chase Andrews, who is found lying in the swamp at the bottom of the town's fire tower in October 1969. Local Sheriff Ed Jackson immediately suspects foul play and arrests Kya. Yet the evidence-a missing shell necklace that Chase always wore around his neck, and which was a gift from Kya-is weak and she is eventually found innocent in court.
During the trial, Kya's past unfolds in form of flashbacks, and the reader learns about her childhood and her life as a young woman in the 1950s and 1960s. Abandoned by her mother and later her siblings who all fled their violent father, Kya is presented as a traumatized person who endures life with her alcoholic father until he also leaves her. She grows up alone in the marsh; her only adult acquaintances are Jumpin', the Black owner of the gas station where she fuels up her boat, and his wife Mabel. Kya learns to live on what her environment has to offer and decides that the landscape and...