What went wrong for the big screen adaptation of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing?
was Owens’ first novel. Its heroine is Kya Clark, who lives in a shack in the swampy wilds of North Carolina. The action begins in 1952, when Kya is six, the youngest of five children who live in fear of their abusive father. Their mother, who suffers the brunt of his violence, walks out on the family on the book’s second page.
If the novel had consisted of those two elements only, I doubt it would have sold 12 million copies. But when Owens addressed herself to the natural world rather than the social one, her prose got markedly better. The parts of her book that worked, and lingered in the mind, all had to do with the theme of wildness.As a piece of eco-escapism,was undeniably effective.
Shoehorning similar material into the framework of a quasi-realistic modern novel, Owens creates some glaring improbabilities. For a supposed wild child, Kya is remarkably accomplished and literate. Unlike Victor of Aveyron, she doesn’t grunt and get around on all fours. On the contrary: she’s presentable enough to make both Chase and Tate beat a path to the door of her surprisingly schmick shack.was a patchy book. But Hollywood once had a knack for turning patchy books into superior movies.
In the book, the early abandonment scenes happen quickly, but they’re written well enough to make you feel their weight. In the movie they just happen quickly. In the book, Owens lays down a drumbeat of animal imagery to drive home the message that Kya is a child of nature. The movie fails to exploit the language of film in any analogous way. The novel doesn’t shy away from the realities of racial segregation in the South. The movie does.