Where the Crawdads Sing reduces a rich novel to a love triangle
Delia Owens’s novel was probably destined to be a bestseller. How many books manage to combine a distinctive sense of natural “place” — the marshes surrounding the North Carolina town of Barkley Cove — with themes of survival, romance, and murder? And with a bestseller comes a film adaptation; hence the recently released Where the Crawdads Sing, which is playing in theaters now. When the town’s golden boy Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) is found dead at the base of a rickety wooden tower, blame immediately falls on the enigmatic Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones, likely best known for her recent starring turn in Normal People), who lives alone in a rickety house deep within the marsh.
