Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens

I did enjoy this best-selling novel about Kya, a girl who grows to a woman almost entirely alone in the marshes of North Carolina. The book, by the naturalist Delia Owens, is a bildungsroman of a girl Mowgli, not raised by wolves but by herself and her sea birds, insects, and and all the teeming wildlife of the marsh.
It was a little off-putting to accept the idea of a girl of six abandoned almost completely by her family except for an abusive alcoholic father who was rarely home and eventually completely gone. So it took a bit of the willing suspension of disbelief to enter the wondrous and dangerous world of a marvelous child with only one day of school who grows in self-reliance to womanhood by her own strengths and curiosity.
There is also a murder mystery here too, not in the sense of a whodunit, but in the more classic sense of the inevitability of tragic consequences. What is so appealing in this book is how the author weaves together the characteristics of the natural world into shaping Kya’s sense of identity. What she learns in her solitary life about the natural world and natural selection is not only how she lives and prospers but how she survives and prevails. Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens, 2018, Putnam’s.