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Book Review

Where the crawdads sing.

• Delia Owens
• Drama , Suspense/Thriller

Readability Age Range

• 18 years old and up
• Penguin Random House
• #1 New York Times Bestseller; Reese’s Book Club; British Book Award; Business Insider Defining Book of the Decade; #1 Bestselling Book of the Year; #1 International Bestseller; Edgar Award Nominee; Macavity Award Nominee

Year Published

For years, rumors about Kya Clark swirled around the quiet fishing village of Barkley Cove. Barefoot and wild, they called her the “Marsh Girl.” And when something unthinkable happens and a young man is found dead, it’s Kya the Marsh Girl they blame.

Plot Summary

Kya Clark, known by some locals as the “Marsh Girl,” grew up in a swamp. And that makes her, well, “swamp trash” as far as most folks in the North Carolina coastal community of Barkley Cove are concerned.

One by one, starting with her mother, Kya’s family members all ran off to escape Kya’s intolerable father. And then he ran off, too.

Though she’s been virtually alone from the time she was 6, Kya can never quite stifle her need for human connection. Of course, connecting with people is not easy for a girl living by her lonesome in a swamp. But the one thing she can embrace is the wild, natural world around her. And she tries to understand every relationship through her experience with nature, which causes her to have an unsettling effect on almost all the people she interacts with.

The main exception is Tate Walker, a local boy who befriends her as she turns from child to teenager. Kya’s wildness is beautiful to him, and he compassionately teaches her to read. The pair understand each other because of their mutual appreciation for the marsh, but Kya’s upbringing has put her on a collision course with polite society.

That collision effectively blows up when a former star quarterback and town hot shot named Chase Andrews turns up dead in the marsh. Inconclusive evidence and a romantic run-in are all the townspeople need to start pointing fingers.

And the Marsh Girl is everyone’s top suspect.

Christian Beliefs

It’s said that the town “serves its religion hard-boiled and deep fried.” Kya knows about three white churches and two black churches in the area. One of these black churches helps provide her with clothes, but a white preacher’s wife tells her daughter that Kya is dirty and to stay away.

Several scenes show that Kya feels she is not presentable enough for God, and that Christianity tends to be about religious rituals and posturing.

Other Belief Systems

The evolution of people from animals is implied, and animalistic instincts are a major part of Kya’s worldview. In fact, Kya’s  connection with the Earth and mother nature is akin to worship.

Authority Roles

The glaring lack of authority in Kaya’s life during most of her development as a child, teenager, and young adult is integral to the plot of Where the Crawdads Sing . Arguably, nature itself is her most positive authority figure.

Kya’s dad is abusive and an alcoholic. He relies on a 7-year-old girl to do his cleaning and to cook for herself when her mother, and then older siblings, leave. Throughout the story, Kya’s father is unreliable and he teaches her to deeply mistrust others.

Her mother is shown as a loving figure, but she failed Kya by leaving. Kya’s memories of her fade, and someone later explains that the woman was mentally ill.

Kya’s older brother, Jodie, teaches her a few things about how to survive in the marsh and how to deal with their violent dad, until he leaves in fear of their father.

Kya eventually considers a man named “Jumpin” to be her closest authority figure. He is a kind, protective and consistent presence who gives her basic supplies.

Profanity & Violence

The dialogue includes scattered foul language, especially while Kya’s dad is around, including several occurrences of the s-word and “b–—ch” in various forms. A few strong racial slurs are directed at African American characters. The f-word is used a few times in reference to an article on animals.

The novel addresses physical abuse. Kya’s family suffers at the hands of her dad in varying levels of detail throughout. Kya remembers being struck by a belt and a paddle. Her brother is stabbed in the face with a fire poker. Police officers discover that Chase died because he was pushed from a fire tower. A man assaults Kya, and she beats him badly in self-defense.

Kya’s dad drinks heavily. Chase’s drinking is mentioned.

Two police officers speculate that Chase may have been involved with drugs, which led to his death.

Sexual Content

The sexual content in this book is intense, adult and problematic. Kya’s sexually charged encounters with her first love are described in detail, and it includes nudity. The pair’s longing for one another is clear, and the sexually explicit content is comparable to that of an R-rated movie.

Throughout the book, Kya contemplates the mating rituals of various animals and, sometimes, the resulting violence between mates. Later, Kya has sex with another man after his repeated advances, and he treats her roughly. After their consensual relationship ends, he assaults her and attempts to rape her.

Discussion Topics

Get free discussion question for books at focusonthefamily.com/magazine/thriving-family-book-discussion-questions .

Additional Comments

Where the Crawdads Sing will draw the attention of young readers because of the public praise for the novel as well as the fact that it’s been made into a major motion picture. And this book does explore some deep themes, including the longing that all people, especially women, have for sustaining connection with others, platonically and romantically.

That said, the heavy sexual content, violence, and language here make this an ill-advised read for young people. Even adults should approach this novel with caution and be aware of its content.

You can request a review of a title you can’t find at [email protected] .

Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not necessarily their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. The inclusion of a book’s review does not constitute an endorsement by Focus on the Family.

Review by Marsella Evans

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Movie Review: Where the Crawdads Sing

This marshy tale grows on you like a wetland flower. But it’s both lovely and harsh.

Read the Plugged In review: https://www.pluggedin.com/movie-reviews/where-the-crawdads-sing-2022/

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The cicadas buzz and the moss drips and the sunset casts a golden shimmer on the water every single evening. But while “Where the Crawdads Sing” is rich in atmosphere, it’s sorely lacking in actual substance or suspense.

Maybe it was an impossible task, taking the best-selling source material and turning it into a cinematic experience that would please both devotees and newbies alike. Delia Owens ’ novel became a phenomenon in part as a Reese Witherspoon book club selection; Witherspoon is a producer on “Where the Crawdads Sing,” and Taylor Swift wrote and performs the theme song, adding to the expectation surrounding the film’s arrival.

But the result of its pulpy premise is a movie that’s surprisingly inert. Director Olivia Newman , working from a script by Lucy Alibar , jumps back and forth without much momentum between a young woman’s murder trial and the recollections of her rough-and-tumble childhood in 1950s and ‘60s North Carolina. (Alibar also wrote “ Beasts of the Southern Wild ,” which “Where the Crawdads Sing” resembles somewhat as a story of a resourceful little girl’s survival within a squalid, swampy setting.)  

It is so loaded with plot that it ends up feeling superficial, rendering major revelations as rushed afterthoughts. For a film about a brave woman who’s grown up in the wild, living by her own rules, “Where the Crawdads Sing” is unusually tepid and restrained. And aside from Daisy Edgar-Jones ’ multi-layered performance as its central figure, the characters never evolve beyond a basic trait or two.

We begin in October 1969 in the marshes of fictional Barkley Cove, North Carolina, where a couple of boys stumble upon a dead body lying in the muck. It turns out to be Chase Andrews, a popular big fish in this insular small pond. And Edgar-Jones’ Kya, with whom he’d once had an unlikely romantic entanglement, becomes the prime suspect. She’s an easy target, having long been ostracized and vilified as The Marsh Girl—or when townsfolk are feeling particularly derisive toward her, That Marsh Girl. Flashbacks reveal the abuse she and her family suffered at the hands of her volatile, alcoholic father ( Garret Dillahunt , harrowing in just a few scenes), and the subsequent abandonment she endured as everyone left her, one by one, to fend for herself—starting with her mother. These vivid, early sections are the most emotionally powerful, with Jojo Regina giving an impressive, demanding performance in her first major film role as eight-year-old Kya.

As she grows into her teens and early 20s and Edgar-Jones takes over, two very different young men shape her formative years. There’s the too-good-to-be-true Tate (Taylor John Smith ), a childhood friend who teaches her to read and write and becomes her first love. (“There was something about that boy that eased the tautness in my chest,” Kya narrates, one of many clunky examples of transferring Owens’ words from page to screen.) And later, there’s the arrogant and bullying Chase ( Harris Dickinson ), who’s obviously bad news from the start, something the reclusive Kya is unable to recognize.

But what she lacks in emotional maturity, she makes up for in curiosity about the natural world around her, and she becomes a gifted artist and autodidact. Edgar-Jones embodies Kya’s raw impulses while also subtly registering her apprehension and mistrust. Pretty much everyone lets her down and underestimates her, except for the kindly Black couple who run the local convenience store and serve as makeshift parents (Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt , bringing much-needed warmth, even though there’s not much to their characters). David Strathairn gets the least to work with in one of the film’s most crucial roles as Kya’s attorney: a sympathetic, Atticus Finch type who comes out of retirement to represent her.

This becomes especially obvious in the film’s courtroom scenes, which are universally perfunctory and offer only the blandest cliches and expected dramatic beats. Every time “Where the Crawdads Sing” cuts back to Kya’s murder trial—which happens seemingly out of nowhere, with no discernible rhythm or reason—the pacing drags and you’ll wish you were back in the sun-dappled marshes, investigating its many creatures. ( Polly Morgan provides the pleasing cinematography.)

What actually ends up happening here, though, is such a terrible twist—and it all plays out in such dizzyingly speedy fashion—that it’s unintentionally laughable. You get the sensation that everyone involved felt the need to cram it all in, yet still maintain a manageable running time. If you’ve read the book, you know what happened to Chase Andrews; if you haven’t, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it here. But I will say I had a variety of far more intriguing conclusions swirling around in my head in the car ride home, and you probably will, too. 

Now playing in theaters.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)

Rated PG-13 for sexual content and some violence including a sexual assault.

125 minutes

Daisy Edgar-Jones as Catherine 'Kya' Clark

Taylor John Smith as Tate Walker

Harris Dickinson as Chase Andrews

Michael Hyatt as Mabel

Sterling MacEr Jr. as Jumpin'

David Strathairn as Tom Milton

Garret Dillahunt as Pa

Eric Ladin as Eric Chastain

Ahna O'Reilly as Ma

Jojo Regina as Young Kya

• Olivia Newman

Writer (based upon the novel by)

• Delia Owens
• Lucy Alibar

Cinematographer

• Polly Morgan
• Alan Edward Bell
• Mychael Danna

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Where the Crawdads Sing came out of nowhere four years ago to become one of the best-selling literary sensations of all time. Written by the hitherto little-known Delia Owens, who was 69 when the book was published in 2018, the novel about a little Southern swamp rat who had to contend with a fractured family, frightful destitution and an eventual trial for first-degree murder developed into a bestseller of astonishing proportions, topping the list for 32 weeks and spending 135 weeks on the list all-told.

Naturally, it became a hot property for the movies and ended up being produced by none other than that she’s-everywhere phenomenon named Reese Witherspoon , a southerner who might well have played the leading role herself had the book been around a quarter century ago. Unfortunately, this ripe-for-adaptation melodrama has been flattened, de-juiced and otherwise withered into a massively banal and flavorless porridge in which the two male leads, in particular, look as though they just stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalogue. What’s more, the central actress doesn’t even attempt a Southern accent; everyone else has one, so why not her? Perhaps the book’s fans won’t care, but by any objective standard this big-screen adaptation doesn’t cut it from all sorts of angles.

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If you were to come across this film on its own without any prior knowledge of, or connection to, a renowned book, you’d likely pay it little, if any, notice; as a stand-alone movie with no stars or critical notoriety, it doesn’t have much to offer. But this is a different kettle of sea creature, the story of a woefully neglected little sprite who admirably perseveres and steels herself with precious little outside help to become a success on her own terms.

The film does little to explain how she manages this. One by one, those close to her disappear, and the only people who behave nicely to this “marsh girl” are a Black couple who run the local general store and help her out when they can. She’s an outcast and it’s amazing that she survives, but she does and, along the way, becomes a self-taught, highly idiosyncratic artist in the bargain.

From any angle, the odds are terribly against her, but she perseveres in ways that are barely shown and just have to be taken on faith. It would have been interesting to see how she learns and charts a path for herself artistically, but the details of her resourcefulness and budding creativity and are mostly skirted and the film never gets inside her head to make the viewer privy to how she learns to cope and, ultimately, excel.

Beginning in the early 1950s, the yarn is one of destitution, loss and little reason for hope; this swampy part of North Carolina is a place that offers precious few possibilities and seems to turn out very angry people. By the time she reaches her teens, Kya (British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones , of the limited series Normal People ), most of her family has taken off. But instead of looking elsewhere, Kya stays put, eking out a solitary existence on a far fringe of society and eventually showing creative tendencies that will blossom in interesting ways.

By the early 1960s, three men come to play decisive roles in her life. Tate (Taylor John Smith) is a nice cute fellow who eventually heads off for college; Chase (Harris Dickinson) is a hunky bad boy who fancies himself the rooster in these parts, does Kya wrong and soon comes to no good; and Tom Milton (David Strathairn), a down-home lawyer who steps up to defend Kya when she’s wrongly accused of Chase’s murder. It all gets very sticky, and in melodramatic ways that have obviously grabbed the reading public’s appetite with its mixture of the sordid and the inspiring.

But it doesn’t come off well onscreen. For a dark and dirty yarn littered with bad behavior and base motives, the tenor of the proceedings is far too pretty and genteel; there’s little sense of the community in general, of peoples mixed motives and hypocritical attitudes. Nor is there a strong sense of Southern culture the way there was in, say, Elia Kazan’s late 1950s films such as Baby Doll , A Face in the Crowd or Wild River .

More significantly, the viewer is never really made to understand how, all by herself, Kya manages the transition from swamp girl to meticulous artist. Kya is onscreen much of the time but you never get inside her head, either when dealing with others or figuring out how she intends to carve out a life for herself alone and far from civilization. When she finally is forced to appear in such a formal setting as a courthouse for her murder trial, you wonder how she can cope with it all, but at least in this climactic stretch there is the compensation of Strathairn’s company as the defense lawyer who quietly and most competently handles his young client’s case.

Stylistically, the film, which was written by Lucy Alibar, who co-wrote the estimable Beasts of the Southern Wild , and directed by Olivia Newman, whose wrestling drama First Match appeared in 2018, could not be more conventional, emotionally or psychologically. When you finally see Kya’s life work in full flower, it’s quite impressive, but up to then there’s been no sign of her creative progression, of how she arrived at such an exalted state—suddenly, it’s just there. This is a rough story of abuse and survival, but it’s all treated in a surface way that just doesn’t penetrate, offer any insights or go deep.

Sony Pictures releases Where the Crawdads Sing on Friday.

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Daisy edgar-jones in ‘where the crawdads sing’: film review.

A young woman raised in the North Carolina marshes becomes the subject of investigation after a grisly murder in this film adaptation of Delia Owens’ best-selling novel.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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Where the Crawdads Sing is the kind of tedious moral fantasy that fuels America’s misguided idealism. It’s an attempt at a complex tale about rejection, difference and survival. But the film, like the novel it’s based on, skirts the issues — of race, gender and class — that would texture its narrative and strengthen its broad thesis, resulting in a story that says more about how whiteness operates in a society allergic to interdependence than it does about how communities fail young people.

Directed by Olivia Newman ( First Match ), the film adaptation of Delia Owens’ popular and controversial novel of the same name tells the remarkable tale of a shy, reclusive girl raised in the marshes of North Carolina who finds herself embroiled in a grisly police investigation. Her name is Kya ( Daisy Edgar-Jones of Normal People , Fresh and Under the Banner of Heaven ), but to those in the neighboring town, whose residents abhor her, she is known simply as “Marsh Girl.” The account of her life is remarkable because it requires such a powerful suspension of disbelief, a complete abandonment of logic and total submission to the workaday beats of this story.

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Release date: Friday, July 15 Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer, Jr., David Strathairn Director: Olivia Newman Screenwriter: Lucy Alibar Based upon the novel by: Delia Owens

Since its publication in 2018, Owens’ novel has garnered rabid praise and heavy criticism. Reese Witherspoon , one of the film’s producers, made it her Book Club pick in September of that year, and to date 12 million copies have been sold. Fans of Where the Crawdads Sing tend to admire its beatific descriptions of Kya’s world and ostensibly gripping narrative of a girl abandoned and disappointed by almost everyone in her life.

Those less enchanted by the style and the glorification of hyper-independence have pointed out Owens’ troubling treatment of Black characters, the whiffs of classism in her use of dialect and the eerie connections between the novel and Owens’ alleged involvement in a 1990s televised killing of a poacher in Zambia. That latter story in particular reveals troubling levels of white saviorism and condescension toward African countries. That Owens — already well-known before the novel — has managed to build an even more successful career despite details of her past resurfacing is bewildering.    

Where the Crawdads Sing ’s problems can be traced back to the source material. The story, adapted for the screen by Lucy Alibar ( Beasts of the Southern Wild ), opens with the murder of Chase Andrews ( Harris Dickinson ), a beloved resident of the fictional town of Barkley Cove. Cops stumble upon his dead body in the marsh and, after haphazardly scanning the perimeter, declare it a homicide.

Residents of the town, a judgmental and gossiping bunch, are quick to point fingers at Kya, a naturalist and loner, who has lived in the surrounding marshlands for 25 years. After the police arrest Kya (she tries but fails to escape into the verdant, grassy terrain), they send her to jail. Tom Milton (David Strathairn), a local lawyer who has known Kya since she was a barefoot child, decides to represent the young woman.

The film — admirably shot by DP Polly Morgan — stitches together scenes of a nervous Kya in court with flashbacks of her past. Occasionally, Kya, through voiceover, includes additional details about her relationships and feelings toward other people. The first flashback takes us to 1953, where shots of the marshland, colored by a warm, vivid palette, are interrupted by the gray, subdued reality of Kya’s upbringing. She is one of five children, who, in addition to her mother (Ahna O’Reilly), are abused by her alcoholic and temperamental father (Garret Dillahunt). One by one, beginning with her mother, Kya’s family members leave the marsh. Why none of them try to take the youngest child with them is never explained.

This plot hole leaves room to contrive a situation in which Kya, whose father eventually leaves too, lives alone in her tiny family house that sits on acres of marshland. It also allows the film to establish what will become Kya’s most important connection: her relationship with the Black couple who own a local grocery store, Mabel (Michael Hyatt) and Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer, Jr.).

Kya, with the help of this unsurprisingly thinly sketched couple, manages to cobble a life together. She wakes up at dawn to harvest mussels, which she sells to Jumpin’ in exchange for provisions. Mabel teaches her how to count, gives her treats and sews her beautiful dresses (a nod here to costume designer Mirren Gordon-Crozier’s fine work). Occasionally, Kya must dodge child services and hawkish developers.

Although Where the Crawdads Sing is keen on highlighting Kya’s hyper-independence, she survives thanks to the help of Mabel, Jumpin’ and eventually Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith). Tate, a diffident, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy from town, leaves Kya some seeds, teaches her how to read and write and encourages her gift for identifying and drawing the shells, insects, plants and animals of the marsh. Their relationship evolves slowly, in the manner of a predictably plotted YA novel.

Kya is a perplexing figure considering the twists and turns the film takes; for someone whose survival skills and instincts are repeatedly telegraphed, she comes across as dangerously naïve. Jojo Regina, who plays Kya as a child, and Edgar-Jones, who plays her as a young adult, try to make sense of her, but their performances can’t overcome the inconsistencies of what’s on the page.

More flashbacks — 1953, followed by 1962 and then 1968 — show us how Kya’s relationship to the world outside the marsh changes. She learns to love and trust. Her heart gets broken: Edgar-Jones’ most impressive scene is when Kya, upon realizing she has been abandoned again, breaks down on the beach. Morgan’s dexterity with lighting is evident here, and I’d be remiss not to mention the beauty of the film, shot on location in Louisiana’s thick marshes.

Over the years, Kya starts to believe in herself more. She grows less reserved, finds new ways to share her talent with the world and make more money. She even falls in love again. Couple this coming-of-age arc with the courtroom scenes (taking place in 1969) and Where the Crawdads resembles an odd amalgamation of a Nicholas Sparks film, The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird . But whereas the latter two examples contained a modicum of racial awareness, Where the Crawdads Sing is largely devoid of just that.

The narrative depends heavily on racial and gender stereotypes and classist thinking to operate. Mabel and Jumpin’ exist to help Kya survive. Kya’s beauty and delicateness are so over-emphasized that she comes off more manic pixie dream girl than misanthropic protagonist. There is over-reliance on well-timed bombshells to keep us distracted. For many people, Where the Crawdads Sing struck an emotional chord, but it’s worth considering what one has to ignore in order to get there.

Full credits

Distributor: Sony Pictures Production company: 3000 Pictures Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer, Jr., David Strathairn Director: Olivia Newman Screenwriter: Lucy Alibar Based upon the novel by: Delia Owens Producer: Reese Witherspoon, Lauren Neustadter Executive producers: Rhonda Fehr, Betsy Danbury Director of photography: Polly Morgan Production designer: Sue Chan Costume designer: Mirren Gordon-Crozier Editor: Alan Edward Bell Composer: Mychael Danna Casting director: David Rubin

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Where the Crawdads Sing Eats Itself into Nothingness

In a perfect vacuum, you probably wouldn’t guess that Where the Crawdads Sing is based on a runaway publishing phenomenon, a book that has sold more than 12 million copies in just a few years. One doesn’t have to have loved Delia Owens’s debut novel to see why it has appealed to countless readers. Part murder mystery, part swoony romance, part cornpone coming-of-age tale, it’s an atmospheric and gleefully overheated melodrama, the kind of book that might make you tear up even as you curse its (many, many) shortcomings. The movie is resolutely faithful to the incidents of the novel, but it doesn’t seem particularly interested in standing on its own, in being a movie . It feels like an illustration more than an adaptation.

The story of Kya Clark, a young girl abandoned by her destitute family and forced to survive on her own in a remote corner of the North Carolina wilderness, the film starts off (much like the book) with a murder investigation and then flashes back to her life. The body of a man, Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), has been found in the woods, and suspicion has settled on Kya (played as an adult by Daisy Edgar-Jones), a loner known to much of the town as “the Marsh Girl.” Taking up the case is a kindly local retired lawyer (played by a much-needed David Strathairn), who believes that Kya has been accused not because of any actual evidence against her, but because she’s been an outcast all her life, ridiculed and hated for years by the townsfolk as some kind of crazy, uncivilized brute.

As we go through Kya’s earlier years, we see a childhood defined by solitude — her mother and her siblings all leave their abusive father one by one, and dad himself (Garret Dillahunt) eventually disappears, leaving Kya alone in the family’s run-down shack on the edge of the marsh. As she grows up, Kya is romanced by a couple of blandly handsome two by fours — nerdy-nice Tate (played by Taylor John Smith as a grown-up) who shares her obsession with nature but then abandons her, and then local rich-boy Chase, who seems fascinated by her but clearly has little interest in a real relationship. We’re supposed to like one and dislike the other, but both Tate and Chase are so underdeveloped that it’s initially hard to feel much of anything for either. They barely register as people. Smith does little but stare lovingly, and Dickinson (who has, to be fair, distinguished himself in previous roles) brings a dash of snotty entitlement to Chase, but not much else.

The best thing about both novel and movie is Kya herself, a submerged character who finds solace and companionship in nature, and who, never having lived anything resembling a normal life around other people, doesn’t quite know what to do with her emotions. As the young Marsh Girl, Jojo Regina is quite moving; your heart goes out to her when a character reads out the local school lunch menu as a way of enticing the impoverished Kya to attend class. It’s a tough balance, to present a child as being both feisty and vulnerable without going overboard into schmaltzy pathos, and the film handles that particular challenge fairly well. As the grown-up Kya, Edgar-Jones is perhaps best at conveying this young woman’s wounded inner life; that speaks to the actress’s talents. However, she never really feels like someone who emerged from this world, but rather one who was dropped into it; that speaks to the clunky filmmaking.

It’s kind of a shock to find the movie version of Crawdads so lacking in atmosphere, as you’d think that’d be the one thing it would nail. Not the least because that lies at the heart of the book’s appeal: Owens spends pages describing the rough, wild, primeval world in which Kya lives, and she convincingly presents the girl as a part of the natural order of this untouched world. At various points, Kya sees herself reflected in the behavior of wild turkeys, snow geese, fireflies, seagulls, and more. She calls herself a seashell and later on finds friendship in Sunday Justice, the jailhouse cat. Where the Crawdads Sing is a book that drips with atmosphere and environmental detail, which enhance our understanding of the protagonist — and help justify some of the story’s more dramatic turns. Owens is herself a retired wildlife biologist who had previously written a number of nature books before turning to fiction. It’s no surprise that her novel works best as an extension of her prior work.

By contrast, the film’s director, Olivia Newman, presents the marsh as a postcard-pretty backdrop, a mostly distant and at times surprisingly calm and orderly space. There’s little sense of wildness, of unpredictability or abandon. Readers will of course often imagine settings differently than film adaptations, but that’s not the problem here. Onscreen, the marsh just never really registers as any kind of place, and it certainly doesn’t register as a spiritual canvas for Kya’s journey. (At times, I wondered if some of the landscape shots might actually have been green-screened in.) Even the fact that Kya has spent much of her life drawing the wildlife of the region – which ultimately plays a huge role in who she becomes – doesn’t come into play until relatively late in the film. None of these would necessarily be problems if the film weren’t otherwise so faithful to the book’s narrative.

This is the challenge of literary condensation. The murder investigation and the ensuing courtroom drama are the least compelling parts of Owens’s novel, there mostly as a loose framing device to tell Kya’s life story. Indeed, she saves the bulk of the trial for the back half of the book, and then breezes by the suspense and the procedural back-and-forth, presumably because she’s not interested in all that. (Spoiler alert: She’s more interested in the twist she springs in her final pages – a twist that also has some eerie echoes of a real-life murder investigation in Zambia that Owens and her ex-husband are reportedly embroiled in, but that’s a whole other crazy story .)

That leaves the movie with a genre-friendly structure, but almost nothing to populate it with. As a result, for much of Where the Crawdads Sing , we’re left watching a not-very interesting and all-but predetermined trial, with little suspense or surprise. We don’t ever really see what the prosecution’s case is against Kya. (If you read the book, you’d have some sense of it, but even there, it’s cursory and half-baked.) It’s a classic Catch-22: The film, to stay true to its wildly popular source material, has to focus on the case, which in turn leaves the picture little room to breathe, to let the audience bask in the atmosphere of this fascinating milieu… which is at least partly why the source material was so wildly popular in the first place. So, forget the crawdads, the turkeys, the fireflies, the seashells, and the snow geese. Forget even the jailhouse cat. The movie is a snake that eats itself.

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‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Review: The Literary Sensation Becomes a Glossy Summer Popcorn Movie

David ehrlich.

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We may never know the full truth behind Delia Owens’ checkered past as a conservationist — which almost certainly seem to include a militant, white savior-minded approach to policing Zambian wildlife preserves, and may also extend to being a “co-conspirator and accessory” to murder — but the secret to the “ Where the Crawdads Sing ” author’s success is now as obvious as her plotting, even to those of us who had never heard of the runaway bestseller until Taylor Swift invented it a few short weeks ago. Olivia Newman’s (“First Match”) slick and glossy beach read of a movie adaptation brings it all right to the surface. Which is just as well, because the surface is the only layer this movie has.

Yes, this is an expertly contrived melodrama about defiance in the face of abandonment, and sure, it’s also a faintly self-exonerating caricature of a natural woman unspoiled by Western society. But underneath the story’s humid romance with Carolina marshland, and behind its Hollywood-ready façade of backwater Americana, “Where the Crawdads Sing” is really just a swampy riff on “Pygmalion,” with Eliza Doolittle reimagined as a semi-feral outsider who’s obviously the hottest girl in town, but lives in almost complete isolation until the Zack Siler of Barkley Cove teachers her how to read and make out.

Streamlined from its source material with the help of a Lucy Aliber script that embraces the frothiness of Owens’ book while turning down the temperature of its florid, nature is my real mama narration, the film version of “Where the Crawdads Sing” is a lot more fun as a hothouse page-turner than it is as a soulful tale of feminine self-sufficiency. That it’s able to split the difference between Nicholas Sparks and “Nell” with any measure of believability is a testament to Daisy Edgar-Jones ’ careful performance as Kya Clark.

The youngest daughter of an abusive drunk, and the only member of her family who stayed in their remote North Carolina house until the day Pa died sometime in the 1950s, Kya’s childhood was spent watching the people who loved her leave one-by-one (she’s played as a child by Jojo Regina). On her own from an early age, and dehumanized into folklore by the “normal” people in town — especially the kids, who label her “Marsh Girl” and laugh her right back to the swamp when she shows up at school without shoes on — Kya is forced to survive by selling mussels to the nice Black couple who run the local store (Sterling Macer, Jr. as Jumpin, and Michael Hyatt as his wife Mabel).

Some years later she’ll be hauled down to the Barkley Cove jail and forced to stand trial for the murder of a pasty cad named Chase Andrews; it’s there, at the behest of the retired lawyer ( David Strathairn !) who takes her case out of the goodness of his heart, that Kya is finally compelled to share her life story for the first time, her voiceover guiding us through the past in snippets of evocatively overwrought prose that establish her connection to nature. “Marsh is a space of light,” she coos, “where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky.” In a real time is a flat circle kind of twist, it often feels like Kya taught herself to write by reading all the other novels that have been canonized by Reese Witherspoon’s book club.

Of course, self-reliant and capable as Kya is, we soon learn that she learned her letters with the help of the square-jawed soft boy who grew up down the creek. The Dawson Leery to Kya’s Joey Potter, Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) is a kind-hearted soul who lost some family of his own, which might explain why he always remembered the orphaned girl who everyone else in Barkley Cove was eager to forget. In the summer before college, Tate starts leaving Kya supplies on a tree stump — as if he were filling a food trap for a wild animal — only to discover that the Marsh Girl has matured into a movie star. It’s a genuine credit to Newman’s handle on her film’s silly-serious tone that she allows Kya, who doesn’t have electricity or running water, to look like she’s blown all of her mussel money on Pantene Pro-V. Anyway, kissing ensues. Sometimes amid a slow-motion vortex of leaves.

But if Tate thinks the Marsh Girl will always be waiting for him (a girl can only go so far without shoes), he’s in for a rude awakening; once the word gets out that Kya is a total catch, she becomes an irresistible fetish object for the kind of fella who might have less honorable intentions. Enter our corpse-in-waiting, Mr. Chase Andrews. Played by a slithering but somewhat vulnerable Harris Dickinson , who looks so much like Taylor John Smith that his dark-haired character might as well be the blond Tate’s evil twin, Chase loves Kya like a backhanded compliment, and talks down to her even when he’s trying to get her top off. We know he won’t be around for long, but did he fall from that rickety fire tower, or was he pushed? Surely a girl like Kya, so desperate for someone who might not abandon her, wouldn’t kill the one person who hadn’t yet?

That framing device of a question looms in the background of a movie that is far less interested in how Chase dies than it is by how Kya is persecuted for it — by how the Marsh Girl has remained innocent despite a lifetime of prejudice. Shy without being sneaky, naive without seeming childlike, and in tune with nature without going full “raised by wolves” (though the jailhouse cat’s instant affinity for her is a little much), Edgar-Jones’ wide-eyed performance completely sells us on Kya’s reality as a survivor. Her soft voice and defensive posture lend the character a lilting interiority that holds this movie together across multiple timelines.

It’s a doubly impressive feat in an adaptation that’s often edited to feel like a two-hour montage, a nagging issue that leaves “Crawdads” a little off-key from its slippery first half to its inelegant coda (though only one early scene of young Kya and Tate yapping at each other from separate boats truly borders on “Bohemian Rhapsody” territory). It’s just a shame the story’s ultra-predictable ending is presented in a way that denies us the full potential of Edgar-Jones’ performance, as Newman opts for hair-raising inference over primal satisfaction.

To that same point, “Where the Crawdads Sing” works best when it embraces its own true nature as a popcorn movie. Newman seems to recognize that “and David Strathairn” are the three most beautiful words that can ever appear in the opening credits of a studio film, and she gives the actor the space he needs to stalk across a sweaty courtroom in a white suit and make us gasp along with the small crowd of people who’ve gathered to witness Kya’s trial. Dickinson textures Chase as well as the script will allow, but delights in the character’s inherent punchability so that the film’s central love triangle never loses it shape. If Jumpin and Mabel still betray the career-long criticism that Owens tends to infantilize her Black characters, Macer and Hyatt ground their roles in a quiet dignity that pushes back against how they may have been written on the page.

As a movie, “Where the Crawdads Sing” never seems worthy of the hullabaloo that continues to surround the book, but — much like its heroine — Newman’s adaptation finds just enough ways to endure.

Sony Pictures will release “Where the Crawdads Sing” in theaters on Friday, July 15.

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Where the Crawdads Sing

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Watch Where the Crawdads Sing with a subscription on Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

Daisy Edgar-Jones gives it her all, but Where the Crawdads Sing is ultimately unable to distill its source material into a tonally coherent drama.

A particular treat for viewers who love the book, Where the Crawdads Sing offers a faithfully told, well-acted story in a rich, beautifully filmed setting.

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Olivia Newman

Daisy Edgar-Jones

Taylor John Smith

Tate Walker

Harris Dickinson

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Garret Dillahunt

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Where the Crawdads Sing

A woman who raised herself in the marshes of the Deep South becomes a suspect in the murder of a man with whom she was once involved. A woman who raised herself in the marshes of the Deep South becomes a suspect in the murder of a man with whom she was once involved. A woman who raised herself in the marshes of the Deep South becomes a suspect in the murder of a man with whom she was once involved.

• Olivia Newman
• Delia Owens
• Lucy Alibar
• Daisy Edgar-Jones
• Taylor John Smith
• Harris Dickinson
• 719 User reviews
• 194 Critic reviews
• 43 Metascore
• 2 wins & 13 nominations

• Tate Walker

• Chase Andrews

• Jumpin'

• Jodie Clark

• Sheriff Jackson

• Little Tate

• Little Chase

• Little Jodie

• Deputy Perdue

• Eric Chastain

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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Delia Owens : The author of the novel is seen in the courtroom sitting on the front row behind Tom when Patti is testifying about Chase's shell necklace.
• Goofs All the of the addresses of publishers Tate gives to Kya have ZIP codes. He gave her the list in 1962; the first ZIP codes were established on July 1, 1963 and were not in common use until the late 1960s/early 1970s.

Tom Milton : Listen. I know you have a world of reasons to hate these people...

Kya Clark : No, I never hated them. They hated me. They laughed at me. They left me. They harassed me. They attacked me. You want me to beg for my life? I don't have it in me. I won't. I will not offer myself up. They can make their decision. But they're not deciding anything about me. It's them. They're judging themselves.

• Crazy credits Kya's drawings appear alongside the credits.
• Connections Featured in Everything Wrong with...: Everything Wrong With Where The Crawdads Sing in 18 Minutes or Less (2023)
• Soundtracks Ain't It Baby Written by Kenny Gamble and Jimmy Bishop Performed by Kenny Gamble & The Romeos Courtesy of Jamie Record Co.

User reviews 719

• Anurag-Shetty
• Sep 19, 2022

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• How long is Where the Crawdads Sing? Powered by Alexa
• July 15, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official site (Japan)
• Official Sony Pictures
• Xa Ngoài Kia Nơi Loài Tôm Hát
• Houma, Louisiana, USA (street scenes)
• 3000 Pictures
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• $24,000,000 (estimated)
• $90,230,760
• $17,253,227
• Jul 17, 2022
• $144,353,965

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• Runtime 2 hours 5 minutes

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‘Where the Crawdads Sing’: ‘Blue Lagoon’ meets ‘Murder, She Wrote’

Southern-fried whodunit/romance is based on Delia Owens’s 2018 best-selling novel

“I don’t know if there’s a dark side to nature,” says the budding-conservationist protagonist of “Where the Crawdads Sing.” “Just inventive ways to endure.”

That’s how Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones) sums up her views on the animal kingdom — and humanity — in this lyrical coming-of-age story (which also doubles as a murder mystery). First-time director Olivia Newman, adapting Delia Owens’s 2018 bestseller, paints a lush picture of Southern marshland, using large brushstrokes that sometimes recall a Nicholas Sparks melodrama. Yet underneath all the natural beauty lurks something dark indeed.

The film begins in 1969, with Louisiana filling in for the fictional coastal town of Barkley Cove, N.C. Police are investigating the death of a young man named Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) — the prime suspect being Kya, a recluse who has spent much of her young life living alone in the woods. Most townspeople call her “Marsh Girl” and know she had been romantically involved with Chase. They assume the worst of someone they’ve long thought of as a wild child. Fortunately for Kya, gentleman lawyer Tom Milton (David Strathairn) comes out of retirement to defend her.

As Kya tells her story to Tom, the “Crawdads” timeline shifts from the murder investigation to flashbacks of Kya’s troubled childhood. When she was little, Kya (Jojo Regina) stood by as her mother and, eventually, all her siblings ran away from home to escape their drunken, abusive father (Garret Dillahunt). The film’s title is taken from the advice of Kya’s big brother, Cody, who, as he leaves home, tells his 9-year-old sister where to hide when Pa comes looking for a punching bag.

In time, even Pa leaves. Yet there are people looking out for Kya. People like Jumpin’ and Mabel (Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt), who run the local supply store, and, most crucially, people like Tate (Taylor John Smith), who befriends her, teaches her how to read and write, and gradually falls in love with her. “I didn’t know words could hold so much,” she tells him, before he, too, abandons her.

“Marsh is not swamp,” Kya narrates as the film begins. “Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky.” But as much as “Crawdads” seems to rhapsodize about nature, this is a violent paradise that at times suggests a young adult drama directed by Werner Herzog. (Yes, that Werner Herzog.)

London-born Edgar-Jones (“Cold Feet”) convincingly portrays Kya’s haunted shyness, though she doesn’t really look like somebody you or I would shun: Even though she’s raised herself in the woods, her pastoral wardrobe is less feral child than, say, Anthropologie’s summer collection. As Kya’s contrasting young beaus, Dickinson and Smith look pretty much interchangeable, but each actor aptly conveys his respective role: brutal jock in the case of Chase, and sensitive scholar for Tate. With Strathairn’s gentle gravitas suggesting an elderly Atticus Finch, much of “Crawdads” seems like a misty-eyed look at an innocent American past. Not to spoil things, but that’s not exactly what plays out.

Screenwriter Lucy Alibar (“ Beasts of the Southern Wild ”) adapts the source material with a nod to the magic realism that characterized her Oscar-nominated screenplay for that 2012 drama, co-written with director Benh Zeitlin. But although set in a similarly rural environment and, like “Beasts,” revolving around a father and daughter, “Crawdads” is much more conventional, its tone shifting from young love to a small-town crime story. It’s Southern-fried “The Blue Lagoon” meets “Murder, She Wrote” — and topped off with a sprinkling of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

But there’s a more curious resonance with Owens’s own personal life. According to a recent Atlantic article, the “Crawdads” author is wanted for questioning in Zambia in connection with the 1995 killing of an alleged poacher — whose execution was captured on videotape and, the article suggests, may have been carried out by a member of Owens’s family. (There is no statute of limitations on murder in Zambia.)

One might wonder whether the fictional narrative of the beleaguered waif in a judgmental small town is Owens’s way of addressing something in her own past. If there’s an impulse to see Kya as a somewhat Edenic figure, don’t be so quick to judge.

As Taylor Swift sings in “Carolina,” the film’s closing song — which, in its lyrics about “creeks runnin’ through my veins,” bridges pop music with Americana — there’s also an ominous warning: “Muddy these webs we weave.”

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains sexual material and some violence, including a sexual assault. 125 minutes.

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‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ review: How does it compare to the book?

The film has brought delia owens’ bestselling novel to life in the most tragically beautiful way.

By Lindsey Harper

If you see “Where the Crawdads Sing,” please be prepared to have your heart ripped out and completely stomped on again and again. The film has brought Delia Owens’ bestselling novel to life in the most tragically beautiful way.

• The movie follows Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones, who recently starred in “Under The Banner of Heaven” ) as she learns to fend for herself in the marshlands of North Carolina after her family abandons her.
• The film bounces back and forth between past and present, with Kya on trial in the present for the murder of local boy Chase Andrews.
• Rumors spread quickly about Kya the “marsh girl,” but the audience discovers what she’s actually like through flashbacks, as Kya opens herself to new experiences and creates relationships with sweet, tender-hearted Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) and privileged yet powerful Chase (Harris Dickinson).

The good parts: “Where the Crawdads Sing” is simply a masterpiece. The cinematography, acting and plot are absolutely enthralling, and it left me hooked within the first 10 minutes.

• The movie does a great job portraying the book’s sensitive topics of abuse, neglect, abandonment and rape in an extremely realistic way. You truly feel every emotion throughout this movie — whether you want to or not.
• The film remains true to the book. While you don’t have to read the book before seeing the movie, you’ll love it all the more if you have. The characters and location are almost exactly how I pictured them to be in the novel. While I was afraid the actress cast as Kya was too “clean,” Edgar-Jones surprised me and played the role phenomenally — she contrasted Kya’s “marsh girl” title that was assigned to her by society with Kya’s beauty, smarts and unexpected grace.

The cast: Edgar-Jones’ role in Hulu’s “Normal People” as a generally unliked girl with an abusive father seems to have prepared her to play Kya. The actress properly portrays the character’s curiosity, wonder and vulnerability through her expressive brown eyes and mannerisms.

• Sterling Macer Jr. is the perfect Jumpin’ — a kindhearted, protective and loving man who looks like he gives great hugs. Macer’s performance might make you wish he was your dad, which is the epitome of Jumpin’s character.
• Harris Dickinson makes you absolutely hate his character’s guts, which means he played Chase Andrews perfectly. His thoughtless, slimy demeanor does the character justice.
• David Strathairn smashed his role as Kya’s attorney out of the park. Reminiscent of Atticus Finch, Strathairn’s defending speech gives you the hope that he and Kya might just win the case after all.
• The bad parts: This movie will give you puffy eyes and a runny nose from the tears that will run down your face. This is an extremely heavy and emotionally draining movie. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but rather a warning so that you know what you’re getting yourself into.
• While some are calling the movie’s pacing “clunky” or “slow,” I felt the slower pace was necessary in order for the audience to truly understand Kya’s upbringing and to become invested in her character. Without it, I don’t think I would have been as heartbroken when she went through difficult circumstances. It also matched the vibe of the slow, Southern town the story took place in.

The bottom line: “Where the Crawdads Sing” is an incredibly gripping murder mystery and romance that has a plot unlike any other, with a great twist at the end. If you enjoy good acting, aesthetic cinematography and Taylor Swift , you will love this movie.

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‘Where The Crawdads Sing’: Review

By Tim Grierson, Senior US Critic 2022-07-12T16:00:00+01:00

Daisy Edgar-Jones shines in this otherwise pulpy adaptation of the Delia Owens bestseller

Source: Sony Pictures

‘Where The Crawdads Sing’

Dir: Olivia Newman. US. 2022. 125mins

Toxic masculinity, domestic abuse and the shunning of the less-fortunate: Where The Crawdads Sing seethes with myriad social ills, but this adaptation of the Delia Owens bestseller proves to be an unconvincing, melodramatic affair that only occasionally locates the story’s mournful heart. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays a loner who’s lived away from society, only to be suspected of murder because the community considers her nothing more than a freakish recluse. A mixture of love story, courtroom drama and whodunit, the film tends toward cliche, packed with underdeveloped performances and unearned plot twists.

Daisy Edgar-Jones, superb in the 2020 miniseries  Normal People , brings a vulnerability and subtle steel to Kya

Sony will release Crawdads on July 15 in the US and July 22 in the UK, the anticipation bolstered by the book’s popularity. (Since the novel debuted in 2018, it has sold approximately 12 million copies.) Reese Witherspoon produced this adaptation after selecting the novel for her influential Book Club, and will be hoping that real-world controversies surrounding the Owens family and a murder in Zambia in the 1990s, as detailed in a recent investigative piece in ’The Atlantic’, won’t deter potential viewers. But while there’s certainly room at the multiplex for an event film that has nothing to do with superheroes or Minions, it’s more likely that it will be less-than-glowing reviews that impact theatrical prospects.

Rural North Carolina, 1969. Kya (Edgar-Jones) lives by herself in her family’s rustic house out in the marshlands, all her life being cruelly nicknamed “The Marsh Girl” by the townspeople. But when the handsome, popular Chase (Harris Dickinson) is found dead — and because they engaged in a secret romantic relationship — Kya is put on trial, the kindly retired local attorney Tom (David Strathairn) stepping in to represent her.

That trial is juxtaposed with a series of flashbacks as we see the adolescence of the now-25-year-old Kya, who survived an abusive father (Garret Dillahunt), endured poverty, received no formal education and learned to fend for herself, eventually attracting the fancy of a fellow nature-lover, Tate (Taylor John Smith). However, Kya and Tate are soon split apart due to complicated circumstances, leading to her tentative courtship with the cockier Chase.

Director Olivia Newman ( First Match ) works with cinematographer Polly Morgan to capture the beauty of the landscape, suggesting an earthly paradise in which Kya can escape from the world. ( Crawdads was shot outside of New Orleans.) But it’s a paradise that’s constantly threatened, either by her violent father in flashback or by society Kya goes to trial in 1969, facing the possibility of the death penalty if she’s found guilty. 

Edgar-Jones, superb in the 2020 miniseries Normal People , brings a vulnerability and subtle steel to Kya, who is used to being shunned, although that public scorn has done nothing to crush her spirits or dampen her artistic flowering. The character ends up being too much of a construct — a milder variation of the feral wild child cut off from the so-called civilised world — but Edgar-Jones does her best to illuminate Kya’s buried trauma and resilient decency.

Unfortunately, neither of the men in her orbit are especially riveting romantic options. Smith plays Tate with a winning wholesomeness, but his rapport with Edgar-Jones lacks electricity. As a result, the characters’ love affair is a little too chaste, which is meant to contrast later with Chase’s bad-boy demeanour, resulting in a fractious relationship that draws uncomfortable comparisons for Kya to the way her father treated her mother. Dickinson exuded melancholy soulfulness as the dim, hunky model in the Palme d’Or-winning Triangle Of Sadness , but in Crawdads he’s trapped in a far more one-dimensional role as an entitled, snide jock. 

Newman fails to enliven familiar scenes of courtroom intrigue — spectators react with predictably overheated shock to each surprising bit of testimony — and as the flashbacks begin to hint at what happened to Chase, Crawdads builds to an unsubtle condemnation of a close-minded patriarchy that literally and figuratively puts a woman like Kya on trial.

To be sure, the film has valid points to raise about sexual assault and society’s refusal to believe women, but the story’s page-turning pulpiness comes across as shallow and sensational rather than thoughtful or emotionally charged. As for Crawdads ’ final reveal, in a more compelling picture such a twist would have forced the audience to question how we perceive “victims” and “survivors.” Instead, it merely feels glib, an artificial way to hit viewers with one last narrative wallop. 

Production company: Hello Sunshine

Worldwide distribution: Sony Pictures

Producers: Reese Witherspoon, Lauren Neustadter

Screenplay: Lucy Alibar, based upon the novel by Delia Owens

Cinematography: Polly Morgan

Production design: Sue Chan

Editing: Alan Edward Bell

Music: Mychael Danna

Main cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer Jr., Jojo Regina, Garret Dillahunt, Ahna O’Reilly, David Strathairn

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Where the Crawdads Sing review: A glossy, Instagram-primed buffet of cinematic faux-feminism

Film adaptation of delia owens’ murky bestseller depicts rural south carolina as scrubbed so clean you might as well call it #swampcore, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Olivia Newman. Starring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer, Jr, David Strathairn. 15, 126 minutes.

Welcome to Hollywood – where even an active murder investigation isn’t enough to halt the adaptation of a best-selling book into a glossy, Instagram-primed buffet of cinematic faux-feminism. Where the Crawdads Sing , having sold more than 12 million copies since its publication in 2018, is the very definition of a literary sensation. It was featured as part of Reese Witherspoon’s book club. The actor now serves as the film’s executive producer.

Usually, you’d applaud that kind of sage entrepreneurship. But Delia Owens, who wrote Where the Crawdads Sing , is currently wanted for questioning by the Zambian authorities over a piece of ABC News footage that appears to show the shooting and killing by persons unknown of an unidentified poacher on a wildlife reserve overseen by Owens and her husband, Mark. And anyone who argues that these are merely irrelevant pieces of biography – unproven accusations that would sit more comfortably in the margins of a gossip magazine – is faced with the odd and uncomfortable reality that so much of Where the Crawdads Sing reads as a moral defence for nature’s laws superseding those set down by man.

“A swamp knows all about death, and doesn’t necessarily define it as tragedy, certainly not a sin,” the book’s prologue reads, along with the opening lines of Olivia Newman’s film. Its protagonist, Kya ( Daisy Edgar-Jones ), is steadfastly presented as someone whose tether to her marshland home, in South Carolina, is a talisman of unblemished authenticity. When the body of a local man, Chase Andrews ( Harris Dickinson ), is discovered out in the wilderness, everyone assumes that Kya, the reclusive “Marsh Girl” who’s been systematically abandoned by her entire family, must be responsible. She’s arrested and immediately thrown in jail.

Kya and Chase had some sort of dalliance, a distraction from the toils of her star-crossed, fairytale romance with childhood sweetheart Tate ( Taylor John Smith , who is just as blandly pleasant as the role requires). And it’s that Nicholas Sparks-adjacent, impassioned but oh-so chaste love story that Newman and screenwriter Lucy Alibar seem most heavily invested in. I’m not at all surprised. Owens does have a certain, swoony turn of phrase – “being completely alone was a feeling so vast it echoed” is especially lovely – and scenes of Kya and Tate making out inside a tornado of leaves, or as a flock of seabirds tear their way up to the sky, are earnestly staged by Newman.

Does the fact the film largely ignores the book’s treatise on nature and virtue absolve it of all connections to Owens’s real-life controversies? It certainly doesn’t, on an artistic level, improve what’s already contained on the page. Newman’s vision of rural South Carolina is scrubbed so clean you might as well call it #swampcore – the Spanish moss looks bright and pristine, the flower petals on the water almost consciously arranged. Owens, at least, presented the wild as wild. Kya, too, is a young woman treated as if she were feral by those around her, while simultaneously dressing and grooming herself like an Instagram tradwife. There’s a scene where she walks into town, and everyone reacts in shock – this is the first time they’ve ever seen her in makeup and with her hair combed. She looks exactly the same as she does in every other scene in the film.

Where the Crawdads Sing , in short, treats rural poverty as if it were a desirable aesthetic, the ultimate way to reconnect with nature. That’s a problem not only for the obvious reasons. We hear David Strathairn’s kindly lawyer argue in court that Kya never had “the weakness of character” to murder Chase. It feels like we’re being asked to empathise with her less because she’s a social outcast and more because she’s a skinny, pretty, white girl. Edgar-Jones certainly doesn’t skimp on the doe-eyed naivete – post- Normal People and Fresh , there’s a real danger of her being boxed into these kinds of waif roles. Her marginalisation isn’t treated as much more than not being invited to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table.

It feels particularly farcical in the face of how the film’s sole Black characters are treated – a local couple, Jumpin (Sterling Macer Jr) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt), who own a store and care for the abandoned Kya with saintly generosity. Race, in a film set in Sixties South Carolina, does not factor. The film is rigorously insistent that Kya is the only person in her area code who has ever been persecuted in any way.

Again, if anyone had been paying attention to Owens’ past conservation activities, they might have drawn a connection between how patronisingly stereotyped the Black characters are in her book and past allegations of a racist attitude towards the people of Zambia (an acquaintance, in a New Yorker article published in 2010, characterised her views as “Nice continent. Pity about the Africans”). But, hey, who has time to check up on those things when there’s so much money to be made?

‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is in cinemas from 22 July

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When a Troubling Book Gets a Hollywood Makeover

A slick movie adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing doesn’t just sanitize the story; it obfuscates the questionable morality at the novel’s center.

In the best-selling 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing , the author Delia Owens describes the marshlands surrounding a fictional North Carolina town vividly and reverently. They’re a dangerous setting teeming with wildlife, and they toughen up their human inhabitants, including the young Kya. Abandoned by her family, Kya endures one “stinky-hot” day after the next alone, living in a shack with “greenish-black veins of mildew … in every crevice.”

In the film adaptation, out in theaters today, the marshes look far from the “wasteland bog” Owens describes. The opening scenes feature a great blue heron rendered in CGI, guiding the camera through an apparently idyllic weekend-getaway destination, all lush green grass and untouched beaches. Kya’s shack may as well be an Airbnb furnished by Wayfair. And Kya herself, played as a child by Jojo Regina and as a teenager and young adult by Normal People ’s Daisy Edgar-Jones, seems to rarely touch mud: Her clothing is typically spotless, and her hair photoshoot-worthy. Indeed, no one seems to sweat in the southern heat.

Like many big-screen takes on popular novels, Where the Crawdads Sing has received the glossy Hollywood makeover. Directed by Olivia Newman ( First Match ), the movie softens the brutality of Kya’s world until it looks pleasing enough for Instagram. It treats the plot the same way. Though a murder mystery propels the narrative—as it does in the book—the script focuses on the melodrama of Kya’s romances over the crime for which she’s the primary suspect. That allows it to avoid the apparent moral justifications of the novel, in which Kya’s closeness to the land underscores her goodness, and her code of survival trumps human laws. The film also removes much of Owens’s esoteric language about Kya’s connection to wildlife, making the material feel like a Nicholas Sparks project. Such an approach usually flattens the original story, and that’s certainly happening here. But in Where the Crawdads Sing , streamlining Owens’s work has additional effects.

As The Atlantic ’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has reported , Owens is wanted for questioning as a possible witness, co-conspirator, and accessory regarding the 1990s murder of an alleged poacher in Zambia that was captured on camera for an ABC News documentary. The novel’s parallels, given that context, are striking: Kya is a devoted naturalist, much like the writer. She feels more comfortable living in the wild than among society—a claim that has also been made about Owens. Moreover, Owens emphasizes that Kya’s deep ties to her environment elevate her beyond the law. By treating the story as a soapy melodrama rather than an exploration of morality, the new film—whether deliberately or not—avoids addressing the righteousness of the book’s message.

Read: Where the Crawdads Sing author wanted for questioning in murder

The movie adaptation, produced by Reese Witherspoon, also simplifies a somewhat messy plot. The book awkwardly threads together two busy timelines that require a high suspension of disbelief: One begins in 1969, when the body of a local beloved cad named Chase is found in the marsh, and the bigoted townspeople suspect Kya of involvement. The second flashes back to Kya’s coming-of-age as the “Marsh Girl,” who survives against all odds, grows into a beautiful pariah, and publishes several celebrated books about the marshlands. Layered atop the bildungsroman–slash–murder mystery is a courtroom drama, wildlife commentary, and a cast of thinly drawn supporting characters.

But if the novel tried to be everything at once, the film focuses on the book’s most marketable element: Kya’s lustful dalliances with locals in her teenage years. Kya’s crushes and heartbreaks are some of the only parts of Where the Crawdads Sing that are close to believable. The film plays up her romances first with a boy named Tate (Taylor John Smith), and later, Chase (Harris Dickinson). The former is the dream boyfriend, sweet and bland and into nature. The other is a smarmy nightmare who can’t believe that Kya is able to identify species of scallops. In focusing on the love triangle, the film breezes past the ludicrousness of Kya’s story: that a little girl traumatized by her abandonment survived in a rusty shack with no running water or electricity, because look, she’s making out with Hunk No. 1 in a vortex of leaves!

Turning Kya’s story into a down-tempo YA romance unexpectedly gives Where the Crawdads Sing a new dimension. Of course the slick, golden-hour-soaked marsh looks perfect if the manic pixie marsh girl is living in a fantasy. And by giving her a voice-over and framing her flashbacks as stories she’s telling her lawyer, Tom Milton (an ever-dependable David Strathairn), the film raises other questions: Why does Kya, who has come to fear abandonment, risk getting to know anyone else? What is the appeal of human connection at all?

Yet the film’s script ultimately bounces between a knowing artificiality and a frustrating dutifulness. In a way, that’s apt for an adaptation of a novel with both an outlandish plot and a troubling backstory. If the film leaned all the way into its melodrama, it could have been something different: the rare mainstream, studio-produced summer romance made for female audiences, with rich imagery worthy of the big screen. But its source material’s blemishes were always going to be hard to avoid.

Is Where the Crawdads Sing a true story? All your questions about the movie answered

Is Where the Crawdads Sing a true story and how did the story get its name? We answer all your questions about the movie.

Where the Crawdads Sing was one of the most highly anticipated movies for 2022 , having been adapted by Reece Witherspoon's production company Hello Sunshine from Delia Owen’s novel of the same name. 

Book and movie fans headed to theatres in July 2022 to see Normal People star Daisy Edgar-Jones play the lead role of Kya in Where the Crawdads Sing , and now you can watch from the comfort of your own home on Netflix .

But fans have got lots of questions including whether it is a true story, and what exactly is a crawdad?!

• How to watch Where the Crawdads Sing  
• Where the Crawdads Sing review: what our film expert thinks of the movie

Is Where the Crawdads Sing a true story?

No, Where the Crawdads Sing is a fictional story not based on a real-life woman living alone in the marshes in North Carolina who was accused of killing her former love interest. Instead, the movie's based on a novel by Delia Owen, also called " Where the Crawdads Sing ". 

Is Kya black or white in Where the Crawdads Sing?

While it is sometimes assumed by Where the Crawdads Sing readers that Kya is black, we know that Kya and her family are actually white because the character refers to herself as "white trash". 

How old was Kya when her dad left in Where the Crawdads Sing?

By the time Kya reaches double digits in childhood, all of her family have abandoned her. After her mother and siblings leave, Kya is left living with her father, who is a violent alcoholic. However, he starts to spend more and more time away and eventually abandons her at the age of 10. By this point, Kya has become thoroughly self-sufficient, living on the land and occasionally trading in the local town for supplies.

What is Where the Crawdads Sing about? 

Set in North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s, Where the Crawdads Sing follows Kya, a young girl branded 'Marsh Girl' by locals after she learns to live independently after being abandoned by her family as a child.

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After fending for herself and getting to know the ecosystems in the marshlands like no one else, Kya starts putting her knowledge down on paper and illustrating her own books. But her lonely existence leaves her an outcast in the local town, and so when a man is found murdered, Kya quickly finds herself the prime suspect for the crime. 

What does the phrase Where the Crawdads Sing mean?

Where The Crawdads Sing  is an old saying and is something Delia Owen's own mother used to say. Fans who have also read the book will remember it is also a phrase that Tate says   in chapter 17 of the novel.

While talking about finding a place they can go away from the crowds, Tate says: "Well, we better hide way out there where the crawdads sing."

“What d’ya mean, where the crawdads sing? Ma used to say that.” Kya then replies in the novel, explaining that her mother was always encouraging her to explore the marsh and "Go as far as you can — way out yonder where the crawdads sing.”

What are crawdads in Where the Crawdads Sing?

Where the Crawdads Sing is a best-selling novel and now a box-office hit, but what actually is a crawdad and where does it live? A crawdad is a word used in some parts of the US to describe a crayfish, which is a small shellfish-like creature, similar to a lobster, which lives in rivers. 

Why is it called Where the Crawdads Sing? 

The title of the novel and movie is taken from the old saying from Delia's childhood, but while the saying is something that is still used today, Delia admitted that she discovered from a book that crawdads don't actually sing in real life. As with a lot of old-fashioned sayings 'Where the Crawdads Sing' doesn't actually make much sense! 

Where the Crawdads Sing movie ending explained

*WARNING — spoilers for the book and movie below*

In both the film and the book, Kya is found not guilty in Where the Crawdads Sing . 

One morning in 1969 the body of Chase Andrews is found and the police believe Andrews was pushed and thinks that the wild and mysterious "Marsh Girl" was the one who did it. 

Even with a lack of fingerprints and footprints to suggest foul play and a verifiable alibi (she was in Greenville meeting with a book publisher), Kya is taken into custody by police 

Despite testimonies like one from Chase's mother, who claims that the shell necklace that Chase wore every day — one that Kya personally gave him — was missing when his body was discovered, as well as clues including red wool fibers from Kya's hat that are found on Chase's jacket, Kya's defense attorney Tom Milton successfully argues that the prosecutor's case is based less on evidence and more on the town's prejudice against Kya. 

Concluding that Chase's death was an accident, the jury finds Kya not guilty and she is allowed to walk free.  

Claire is Assistant Managing Editor at What To Watch and has been a journalist for over 15 years, writing about everything from soaps and TV to beauty, entertainment, and even the Royal Family. After starting her career at a soap magazine, she ended up staying for 13 years, and over that time she’s pulled pints in the Rovers Return, sung karaoke in the Emmerdale village hall, taken a stroll around Albert Square, and visited Summer Bay Surf Club in sunny Australia. 

After learning some tricks of the trade at websites Digital Spy, Entertainment Daily, and Woman & Home, Claire landed a role at What’s On TV and whattowatch.com writing about all things TV and film, with a particular love for Aussie soaps, Strictly Come Dancing and Bake Off . 

She’s interviewed everyone from June Brown — AKA Dot Cotton — to Michelle Keegan, swapped cooking tips with baking legend Mary Berry backstage at the NTAs, and danced the night away with soap stars at countless awards bashes. There’s not a lot she doesn’t know about soaps and TV and can be very handy when a soapy question comes up in a pub quiz! 

As well as all things soap-related, Claire also loves running, spa breaks, days out with her kids, and getting lost in a good book. 

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Where the Crawdads Sing review: a bland murder mystery

For a film that takes such great pains to immerse viewers in the environment of one specific corner of the United States, Where the Crawdads Sing is shockingly bland. Adapted from Delia Owens’ best-selling 2018 novel, the new film explores the life of a young woman who is forced to raise herself in a marsh in North Carolina. The film, which takes place throughout the 1950s and 1960s, spends a considerable amount of time discussing and showcasing the murky wetland that emerges as its protagonist’s unlikely home.

A suspicious death

A difficult life, a disappointing mystery.

However, Where the Crawdads Sing never truly takes advantage of its backwoods setting. Even when a shocking murder in the film’s central marsh threatens to turn the life of its young heroine upside down, Where the Crawdads Sing remains surprisingly unimaginative, and its refusal to commit to the darker gothic elements of its story renders the film lifeless. Consequently, what could have been a moody and immersive murder mystery instead ends up feeling more like a safe cross between a late-era Nicholas Sparks adaptation and an uninspired, psychologically thin character study.

Where the Crawdads Sing follows Catherine “Kya” Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones from the Hulu  series Normal People ), a young woman who is placed under arrest for the suspected murder of Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) in the film’s opening prologue. After a kind-hearted lawyer (David Strathairn) subsequently offers to represent her, Kya quickly finds herself in the middle of a trial that has the power to determine her entire future. From that point on, Where the Crawdads Sing adopts a multi-timeline structure, one that allows it to explore Kya’s life leading up to her arrest while frequently cutting back to the events of her present-day trial.

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Through the film’s lengthy flashback sequences, we are given glimpses into Kya’s difficult childhood and the years she spent living under the thumb of her abusive father (Garret Dillahunt). After her father unexpectedly abandons her, the film follows Kya as she is forced to learn how to survive on her own in the unforgiving marsh she calls home. Where the Crawdads Sing  then picks up with Kya years later when she begins to attract the attention of not only a handsome young man named Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) but also Harris Dickinson’s Chase Andrews, the very man whose death will send her present-day life spiraling into chaos.

Between its central murder, unique marshland setting, and potentially tense courtroom subplot, Where the Crawdads Sing has all the necessary ingredients to be an involving, psychologically dark murder mystery. However, the film itself is oddly lighter, both visually and tonally, than its premise would have you believe. Its approach to violence ends up feeling particularly lacking, with director Olivia Newman willing to depict the various horrific acts that are perpetrated against Kya by the men around her but not the payback that she is justifiably willing to unleash when the need arises.

The film’s strange attitude toward its violence is only made more apparent by its reluctance to truly lean into the darker aspects of its story. The marsh that Edgar-Jones’ Kya calls home is brightly lit throughout most of the film, which robs the environment of its potentially gothic atmosphere. Newman, instead, chooses to shoot Where the Crawdads Sing ’s numerous marsh sequences as if the environment had been pulled out of a fairytale, with light streaming in from all directions and flowers blooming everywhere you look. It’s a choice that makes the film’s overall aesthetic feel incongruous with its undeniably grim story.

Lucy Alibar’s flashback-heavy script, meanwhile, succeeds at turning Where the Crawdads Sing into a comprehensive portrait of its protagonist’s life, but it also forces the film to move at an unbearably languid pace. After diving right into the present-day, investigative side of its story, Where the Crawdads Sing goes on to spend most of its runtime in the past, following Edgar-Jones’ Kya as she develops the skills that’ll enable her to live on her own and the relationships that’ll turn her life into an emotionally exhausting mess. Unfortunately, the film’s intense focus on Kya’s past also leads to the courtroom scenes that she shares with Strathairn’s Tom feeling like footnotes in Where the Crawdads Sing ’s story.

That especially becomes the case during the film’s second act, which introduces Smith’s Tate and Dickinson’s Chase as well as the fundamentally different romantic relationships that Kya forms with both of them over time. It’s in this section that Where the Crawdads Sing becomes a drawn-out romantic melodrama that, despite Edgar-Jones’ palpable chemistry with both Smith and Dickinson, only serves to further highlight the monotonous nature of the film’s plot.

The few emotionally affecting moments that Where the Crawdads Sing does deliver all come from Edgar-Jones’ capable performance as Kya. Despite being forced to say multiple lines that, frankly, work better in a book than they do in a film, Edgar-Jones still manages to make Kya’s strength and insecurities feel real. She brings a quiet steadiness to her character that not only adds further authenticity to the film’s characterization of her but also makes it easy to buy into some of the more questionable or difficult decisions that she is forced to make throughout it.

The fact that she manages to do so in a film that so often feels like it is running on autopilot is a testament to Edgar-Jones’ increasingly obvious abilities as a performer. Unlike its lead star though, Where the Crawdads Sing fails to bring the intensity that its story that it so dearly requires. The film doesn’t fully commit to any of the aspects of its plot or setting that could have helped it craft a clearer identity for itself, and its disinterest in Kya’s courtroom experiences only makes everything that happens throughout it feel all the more inconsequential.

Therefore, while it works as a showcase for Daisy Edgar-Jones, her performance isn’t enough to stop Where the Crawdads Sing from getting lost in the weeds.

Where the Crawdads Sing hits theaters on Friday, July 15.

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French juggernauts Paris Saint-Germain look to end a two-year drought at the Coupe de France when they take on Lyon in the final today at Stade Pierre-Mauroy. A win for PSG would extend their record to 15 French Cup titles, while Lyon--who haven't won since 2012--are seeking their sixth title in club history.

The match is starting very soon, at 3:00 p.m. ET. If you're in the United States and want to watch, it will be televised on Fox Soccer Plus and Fox Deportes, but we've also found some different ways you can watch a live stream of the match for free. Watch the Lyon vs PSG Live Stream on Fubo

Anya Taylor-Joy in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Warner Bros. Australian director George Miller is one of the great cinematic visionaries of his generation. Once a medical student taking film classes on the side, Miller turned his morbid fascination with car accidents into a cult-classic action film, which in turn gave birth to one of cinema’s most exciting and intriguing worlds. Not content to make bombastic postapocalyptic chase movies forever, Miller then tried his hand at raunchy comedy, dour adult drama, and wholesome family entertainment in both live action and animation. When he returned to his chrome-plated world of gas-guzzling road warriors, he delivered one of the greatest action films of all time. He is a unique and thrilling visual stylist, a technological innovator, and just as importantly, a wise and thoughtful storyteller who proves that style and substance need never be mutually exclusive. But has he ever made a clunker? Your mileage may vary, but here's how we think his filmography stacks up.

10. Happy Feet Two (2011) Like its Oscar-winning predecessor, Happy Feet Two endeavors to tell a whimsical tale about Antarctic wildlife that's packed with both familiar pop songs and ambitious existentialist and environmentalist themes. This time around, however, the style and the stakes simply don't line up, and the result is a George Miller's one and only forgettable movie.

Memorial Day is the time to honor all the men and women who gave their lives to fighting for our country. It’s also a day to celebrate the brave individuals who fought and survived, and those who continue to defend the U.S. As a federal holiday, many people use this day to visit lost family, friends, and others at cemeteries while also looking ahead to brighter days and the upcoming summer season.

If you’re spending quiet time at home with loved ones, you might want to curl up with a good movie. We have rounded up these three great Tubi movies featuring war and military themes that you should watch on Memorial Day. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) All Quiet on the Western Front Official Trailer #1 - Lew Ayres Movie (1930) HD

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New Netflix Shows and Movies in May 2024

Dearest reader, Bridgerton is back

Nicola Coughlan, Bridgerton

As the seasons transition from the end of spring to the beginning of summer, the new shows and movies on Netflix are getting appropriately steamy with the premiere of Season 3 Part 1 of Bridgerton , which finds our dear Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) taking center stage. Also out in the month are Will Forte's new murder podcast comedy Bodkin , Benedict Cumberbatch's Eric , Jerry Seinfeld's Unfrosted,  and the Jennifer Lopez-starring action movie Atlas. But the most important news of the month is that all six seasons of Reba are available to watch on Netflix, for all the surviiiiiivoooors  out there.

Scroll on for more on the month's highlights, plus the full list of everything coming to and leaving Netflix in May 2024.

Next month's guide:   New Netflix Shows and Movies in June 2024 Last month's guide: New Netflix Shows and Movies in April 2024

More streaming:

• All the new shows and movies on HBO and Max
• Everything new and coming to Amazon Prime Video
• All the new shows and movies on Hulu
• The ultimate guide to what to watch in May
• Our most anticipated shows of summer 2024

The best new Netflix movies and shows in May

Will Forte, Siobhán Cullen, and Robyn Cara, Bodkin

A Man in Full  (May 2)

Wealthy, powerful men plummeting from grace always make for juicy drama, so it's no surprise that David E. Kelley adapted Tom Wolfe's novel about an Atlanta real estate mogul going bankrupt into a limited series. Jeff Daniels adopts a Southern twang as Charlie Croker, whose imminent downfall stokes a feeding frenzy for his crumbs, while Croker hisses at them to stay away as he attempts a rebuild. Daniels is joined by Diane Lane , William Jackson Harper , Tom Pelphrey , Lucy Liu , and more, with Regina King and Thomas Schlamme behind the camera. Loaded with chest thumping, obscene wealth, sex, and more, this feels like a Showtime series that somehow landed on Netflix. - Tim Surette   [ Trailer ]

Unfrosted  (May 3)

What is the deal with Pop-Tarts?  Jerry Seinfeld  co-wrote and directed this film, which seems like it amounts to a big budget version of History's excellent  The Food That Built America , focusing on the competition between Kellogg's and Post to create a new breakfast product in the 1960s. (Spoiler: It was the Pop-Tart!) The cast includes Seinfeld,  Melissa McCarthy ,  Jim Gaffigan ,  James Marsden  (as Jack LaLanne!),  Christian Slater , and more.  -Tim Surette   [ Trailer ]

Bodkin  Season 1 (May 9)

Will Forte 's new show sort of looks like if  Only Murders in the Building  were less whimsical. The dark comedy follows a trio of podcasters who take it upon themselves to investigate a series of disappearances in a small town in Ireland. - Allison Picurro   [ Trailer ]

Bridgerton  Season 3 Part 1 (May 16)

Since the start of  Bridgerton , Penelope Featherington ( Nicola Coughlan ) has harbored feelings for Colin Bridgerton ( Luke Newton ). Season 3 will finally explore this friends-to-lovers relationship, and make Penelope — who is secretly Lady Whistledown — the subject of her own gossip column.  Bridgerton  is based on Julia Quinn's historical romance novels, and the first two seasons chronologically followed the love stories in the original titles. Season 3 skips the third book,  An Offer From a Gentleman , which is focused on Benedict Bridgerton ( Luke Thompson ), and adapts the fourth,  Romancing Mister Bridgerton.  It's #Polin time. And we'll be spending two months at the ton, because  Bridgerton  Season 3  launches in two parts : on May 16 and June 13. - Kat Moon   [ Trailer ]

Atlas (May 24)

Artificial intelligence is the hero and the villain in Jennifer Lopez 's new action movie, in which she plays an AI-hating data analyst who discovers that the hyper-intelligent software might be her greatest ally while trying to capture a rogue robot. Lopez seems like she's having fun, and that's all that really matters. - Allison Picurro [ Trailer ]

Eric  Season 1 (May 30)

In my book, the weirder, the better. And Eric looks like one of the better things Netflix is putting out this month. In this dark mystery series set in the the scummy '80s of New York City, Benedict Cumberbatch stars as a puppeteer on a popular children's show whose life and mental stability are derailed when his 9-year-old son is kidnapped. As he slips on the pool of his own melting sanity, he finds an unusual ally in his search for his son: Eric, the blue monster puppet that his son created, brought to life by his own deteriorating imagination. Yes! - Tim Surette

More on Netflix:

• The best TV shows on Netflix right now
• The best movies on Netflix right now

Everything coming to Netflix in May

May 1 Deaw Special: Super Soft Power Down The Rabbit Hole Frankly Speaking Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar Airport Airport '77 Airport 1975 The Best Man Holiday Blended Blue Mountain State: Season 1 Blue Mountain State: Season 2 Blue Mountain State: Season 3 Blue Mountain State: The Rise of Thadland Eat Pray Love The Edge of Seventeen The Equalizer The Gentlemen Hellboy (2019) Hulk Jumanji (1995) Liar Liar Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa The Matrix Resurrections Mortal Kombat (2021) Mr. & Mrs. Smith The Nutty Professor The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps Outlander: Season 6 Patriots Day Public Enemies Ride Along Shrek Shrek Forever After Starship Troopers Traffic The Wedding Planner White House Down Woody Woodpecker The Young Victoria

May 2 A Man in Full Beautiful Rebel Secrets of the Neanderthals T・P BON

May 3 2 Hearts John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's In L.A Postcards Selling the OC: Season 3 The Unbroken Voice: Season 2 Unfrosted

May 4 The Atypical Family Katt Williams: Woke Foke

May 5 The Peanut Butter Falcon Roast of Tom Brady

May 6 30 for 30: Broke 30 for 30: Deion's Double Play 30 for 30: The Two Escobars Reba: Seasons 1-6

May 7 Super Rich in Korea

May 8 The Final: Attack on Wembley War Dogs

May 9 Bodkin The Guardian of the Monarchs Mother of The Bride Sing Street Thank You, Next

May 10 Blood of Zeus: Season 2 Cooking Up Murder: Uncovering the Story of César Román Living with Leopards Pokémon Horizons: The Series Part 2 The Ultimatum: South Africa

May 11 Mark Twain Prize Award: Kevin Hart

May 13 Archer: Seasons 1-13 Princess Power: Season 3

May 14 Married at First Sight: Season 15

May 15 Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal The Clovehitch Killer

May 16 Bridgerton: Season 3 Part 1 Dumb and Dumber To Maestro in Blue: Season 2 Upgrade

May 17 The 8 Show Power Thelma the Unicorn

May 19 A Simple Favor Golden Kamuy

May 20 The Parisian Agency: Exclusive Properties: Season 4

May 21 Rachel Feinstein: Big Guy Wildfire: Seasons 1-4

May 22 Act Your Age: Season 1 Toughest Forces on Earth

May 23 El vendedor de ilusiones: El caso Generación Zoe Franco Escamilla: Ladies' Man Garouden: The Way of the Lone Wolf In Good Hands 2 Tires

May 24 Atlas Butterfly in the Sky: The Story of Reading Rainbow Jurassic World: Chaos Theory Mulligan: Part 2 My Oni Girl

May 28 Burnt

May 29 Bionic Colors of Evil: Red Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult Patrick Melrose

May 30 Eric Geek Girl

May 31 A Part of You Chola Chabuca How to Ruin Love: The Proposal Raising Voices Tòkunbọ̀

Everything leaving Netflix in May

May 1 Bennett's War Magic Mike's Last Dance

May 2 Survive the Night

May 3 Arctic Dogs

May 8 Uncut Gems

May 9 Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

May 10 St. Vincent

May 11 Where the Crawdads Sing

May 14 Fifty Shades of Black

May 19 Rosario Tijeras (Mexico): Seasons 1-3

May 21 Sam Smith: Love Goes - Live at Abbey Road Studios

May 22 The Boxtrolls

May 26 Mako Mermaids: An H2O Adventure: Seasons 3-4

May 31 2012 Boyz n the Hood Burlesque The Choice The Disaster Artist Forever My Girl The Great Gatsby Happy Gilmore The Hunger Games The Hunger Games: Catching Fire The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 The Impossible Insidious L.A. Confidential Lakeview Terrace The Mick: Seasons 1-2 Noah Oh, Ramona! The Other Guys Silent Hill Skyscraper Split Think Like a Man Think Like a Man Too You've Got Mail

Inside Reese Witherspoon’s Literary Empire

When her career hit a wall, the Oscar-winning actor built a ladder made of books — for herself, and for others.

“Reading is the antidote to hate and xenophobia,” Reese Witherspoon said. “It increases our empathy and understanding of the world.” Credit... Jingyu Lin for The New York Times

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By Elisabeth Egan

Reporting from Nashville

• May 18, 2024

“You’d be shocked by how many books have women chained in basements,” Reese Witherspoon said. “I know it happens in the world. I don’t want to read a book about it.”

Nor does she want to read an academic treatise, or a 700-page novel about a tree.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Sitting in her office in Nashville, occasionally dipping into a box of takeout nachos, Witherspoon talked about what she does like to read — and what she looks for in a selection for Reese’s Book Club, which she referred to in a crisp third person.

“It needs to be optimistic,” Witherspoon said. “It needs to be shareable. Do you close this book and say, ‘I know exactly who I want to give it to?’”

But, first and foremost, she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves. “Because that’s what women do,” she said. “No one’s coming to save us.”

Witherspoon, 48, has now been a presence in the book world for a decade. Her productions of novels like “ Big Little Lies ,” “ Little Fires Everywhere ” and “ The Last Thing He Told Me ” are foundations of the binge-watching canon. Her book club picks reliably land on the best-seller list for weeks, months or, in the case of “ Where the Crawdads Sing ,” years. In 2023, print sales for the club’s selections outpaced those of Oprah’s Book Club and Read With Jenna , according to Circana Bookscan, adding up to 2.3 million copies sold.

So how did an actor who dropped out of college (fine, Stanford) become one of the most influential people in an industry known for being intractable and slightly tweedy?

It started with Witherspoon’s frustration over the film industry’s skimpy representation of women onscreen — especially seasoned, strong, smart, brave, mysterious, complicated and, yes, dangerous women.

“When I was about 34, I stopped reading interesting scripts,” she said.

Witherspoon had already made a name for herself with “ Election ,” “ Legally Blonde ” and “ Walk the Line .” But, by 2010, Hollywood was in flux: Streaming services were gaining traction. DVDs were following VHS tapes to the land of forgotten technology.

“When there’s a big economic shift in the media business, it’s not the superhero movies or independent films we lose out on,” Witherspoon said. “It’s the middle, which is usually where women live. The family drama. The romantic comedy. So I decided to fund a company to make those kinds of movies.”

In 2012, she started the production company Pacific Standard with Bruna Papandrea. Its first projects were film adaptations of books: “ Gone Girl ” and “ Wild ,” which both opened in theaters in 2014.

Growing up in Nashville, Witherspoon knew the value of a library card. She caught the bug early, she said, from her grandmother, Dorothea Draper Witherspoon, who taught first grade and devoured Danielle Steel novels in a “big cozy lounger” while sipping iced tea from a glass “with a little paper towel wrapped around it.”

This attention to detail is a smoke signal of sorts: Witherspoon is a person of words.

When she was in high school, Witherspoon stayed after class to badger her English teacher — Margaret Renkl , now a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times — about books that weren’t part of the curriculum. When Witherspoon first moved to Los Angeles, books helped prepare her for the “chaos” of filmmaking; “ The Making of the African Queen ” by Katharine Hepburn was a particular favorite.

So it made sense that, as soon as Witherspoon joined Instagram, she started sharing book recommendations. Authors were tickled and readers shopped accordingly. In 2017, Witherspoon made it official: Reese’s Book Club became a part of her new company, Hello Sunshine.

The timing was fortuitous, according to Pamela Dorman, senior vice president and publisher of Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, who edited the club’s inaugural pick, “ Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine .” “The book world needed something to help boost sales in a new way,” she said.

Reese’s Book Club was that something: “Eleanor Oliphant” spent 85 weeks on the paperback best-seller list. The club’s second pick, “The Alice Network,” spent nearly four months on the weekly best-seller lists and two months on the audio list. Its third, “ The Lying Game ,” spent 18 weeks on the weekly lists.

“There’s nothing better than getting that phone call,” added Dorman, who has now edited two more Reese’s Book Club selections.

Kiley Reid’s debut novel, “ Such a Fun Age ,” got the nod in January 2020. She said, “When I was on book tour, a lot of women would tell me, ‘I haven’t read a book in four years, but I trust Reese.’” Four years later, on tour for her second novel, “ Come and Get It ,” Reid met women who were reading 100 books a year.

Witherspoon tapped into a sweet spot between literary and commercial fiction, with a few essay collections and memoirs sprinkled in. She turned out to be the literary equivalent of a fit model — a reliable bellwether for readers in search of intelligent, discussion-worthy fare, hold the Proust. She wanted to help narrow down the choices for busy readers, she said, “to bring the book club out of your grandma’s living room and online.”

She added: “The unexpected piece of it all was the economic impact on these authors’ lives.”

One writer became the first person in her family to own a home. “She texted me a picture of the key,” Witherspoon said. “I burst into tears.”

Witherspoon considers a handful of books each month. Submissions from publishers are culled by a small group that includes Sarah Harden, chief executive of Hello Sunshine; Gretchen Schreiber, manager of books (her original title was “bookworm”); and Jon Baker, whose team at Baker Literary Scouting scours the market for promising manuscripts.

Not only is Witherspoon focused on stories by women — “the Bechdel test writ large,” Baker said — but also, “Nothing makes her happier than getting something out in the world that you might not see otherwise.”

When transgender rights were in the headlines in 2018, the club chose “ This Is How It Always Is ,” Laurie Frankel’s novel about a family grappling with related issues in the petri dish of their own home. “We track the long tail of our book club picks and this one, without fail, continues to sell,” Baker said.

Witherspoon’s early readers look for a balance of voices, backgrounds and experiences. They also pay attention to the calendar. “Everyone knows December and May are the busiest months for women,” Harden said, referring to the mad rush of the holidays and the end of the school year. “You don’t want to read a literary doorstop then. What do you want to read on summer break? What do you want to read in January?”

Occasionally the group chooses a book that isn’t brand-new, as with the club’s April pick, “ The Most Fun We Ever Had ,” from 2019. When Claire Lombardo learned that her almost-five-year-old novel had been anointed, she thought there had been a mistake; after all, her new book, “Same As it Ever Was,” is coming out next month. “It’s wild,” Lombardo said. “It’s not something that I was expecting.”

Sales of “The Most Fun We Ever Had” increased by 10,000 percent after the announcement, according to Doubleday. Within the first two weeks, 27,000 copies were sold. The book has been optioned by Hello Sunshine.

Witherspoon preferred not to elaborate on a few subjects: competition with other top-shelf book clubs (“We try not to pick the same books”); the lone author who declined to be part of hers (“I have a lot of respect for her clarity”); and the 2025 book she’s already called dibs on (“You can’t imagine that Edith Wharton or Graham Greene didn’t write it”).

But she was eager to set the record straight on two fronts. Her team doesn’t get the rights to every book — “It’s just how the cookie crumbles,” she said — and, Reese’s Book Club doesn’t make money off sales of its picks. Earnings come from brand collaborations and affiliate revenue.

This is true of all celebrity book clubs. An endorsement from one of them is a free shot of publicity, but one might argue that Reese’s Book Club does a bit more for its books and authors than most. Not only does it promote each book from hardcover to paperback, it supports authors in subsequent phases of their careers.

Take Reid, for instance. More than three years after Reese’s Book Club picked her first novel, it hosted a cover reveal for “Come and Get It,” which came out in January. This isn’t the same as a yellow seal on the cover, but it’s still a spotlight with the potential to be seen by the club’s 2.9 million Instagram followers.

“I definitely felt like I was joining a very large community,” Reid said.

“Alum” writers tend to stay connected with one another via social media, swapping woot woots and advice. They’re also invited to participate in Hello Sunshine events and Lit Up, a mentorship program for underrepresented writers. Participants get editing and coaching from Reese’s Book Club authors, plus a marketing commitment from the club when their manuscripts are submitted to agents and editors.

“I describe publishing and where we sit in terms of being on a river,” Schreiber said. “We’re downstream; we’re looking at what they’re picking. Lit Up gave us the ability to look upstream and say, ‘We’d like to make a change here.’”

The first Lit Up-incubated novel, “Time and Time Again” by Chatham Greenfield, is coming out from Bloomsbury YA in July. Five more fellows have announced the sales of their books.

As Reese’s Book Club approaches a milestone — the 100th pick, to be announced in September — it continues to adapt to changes in the market. Print sales for club selections peaked at five million in 2020, and they’ve softened since then, according to Circana Bookscan. In 2021, Candle Media, a Blackstone-backed media company, bought Hello Sunshine for $900 million. Witherspoon is a member of Candle Media’s board. She is currently co-producing a “Legally Blonde” prequel series for Amazon Prime Video.

This month, Reese’s Book Club will unveil an exclusive audio partnership with Apple, allowing readers to find all the picks in one place on the Apple Books app. “I want people to stop saying, ‘I didn’t really read it, I just listened,’” Witherspoon said. “Stop that. If you listened, you read it. There’s no right way to absorb a book.”

She feels that Hollywood has changed over the years: “Consumers are more discerning about wanting to hear stories that are generated by a woman.”

Even as she’s looking forward, Witherspoon remembers her grandmother, the one who set her on this path.

“Somebody came up to me at the gym the other day and he said” — here she put on a gentle Southern drawl — “‘I’m going to tell you something I bet you didn’t hear today.’ And he goes, ‘Your grandma taught me how to read.’”

Another smoke signal, and a reminder of what lives on.

Read by Elisabeth Egan

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond .

Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years. More about Elisabeth Egan

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When Reese Witherspoon is making selections for her book club , she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who died on May 14 , specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope , spanning decades with intimacy and precision.

“The Light Eaters,” a new book by Zoë Schlanger, looks at how plants sense the world  and the agency they have in their own lives.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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