#WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING HOW TO#

Some time later, while relaxing in a cove, Kya is confronted by Chase. After advising Kya to give Tate a second chance, Jodie sets off for Georgia, leaving Kya a note with his phone number and address. Kya forgives her mother for leaving but still cannot understand why she never returned. The same year, Jodie, now in the Army, also returns to Kya's life, expressing regret he left her alone and breaking the news their mother had suffered from mental illness and died of leukemia two years previously. With the extra money, she renovates her home. He urges her to publish a reference book on seashells, and she does so as well as on seabirds. Despite this, she allows him inside her shack, and he is impressed by her expanded collection of seashells. Still hurt from his betrayal, she rejects him. Tate, having graduated from college, visits Kya and attempts to apologize for having left her and confesses his love for her.

After shopping for groceries one day, she reads in the newspaper of Chase's engagement to another woman, and realizes his promises of marriage were a ruse for sex. Despite her suspicions, she believes Chase's promises of marriage and consummates their relationship in a cheap motel room in Asheville, NC. He shows her an abandoned fire tower, and she gives him a necklace of a shell he found during their picnic, strung on a rawhide string. He later apologizes, but the two form a romantic relationship. Chase Andrews, Barkley Cove's star quarterback and playboy, invites her to a picnic, during which he tries to have sex with her. He promises to return, yet later realizes Kya cannot live in his more civilized world because of how wild and independent she is, and leaves her without saying goodbye.ĭelia Owens's novel is set in a North Carolina marsh like the one illustrated above The two form a romantic relationship until Tate leaves for college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING HOW TO#

Years later, he leaves her feathers from rare birds, then teaches her how to read and write. When Kya loses her bearings one day, Tate leads her home in his boat. However, she becomes friendly with Tate Walker, an old friend of Jodie's who sometimes fishes in the marsh. She is laughed at by the schoolchildren the only day she goes to school and is called 'nasty' and 'filthy' by the pastor's wife.

Jumpin' and his wife Mabel become lifelong friends to Kya, and Mabel collects donated clothing for her.Īs Kya grows up, she faces prejudice from the townspeople of Barkley Cove, NC, who nickname her 'The Marsh Girl'. Without money and family, she survives by gardening and trading fresh mussels and smoked fish for money and gas from Jumpin', a black man who owns a gasoline station at the boat dock. Eventually, he does not return at all, and Kya assumes he is dead, making him the last of the family to leave her alone in the marsh. He returns to drinking and takes long, frequent trips away to gamble.

When he reads the letter, he becomes infuriated and burns the letter along with most of her mother's wardrobe and canvases. She recognizes it as having been sent from her mother, and she leaves it on the table for her father to find. One day, Kya finds a letter in the mailbox. The illiterate Kya paints these shells and feathers, as well as the marsh's creatures and shorelines, with watercolors her mother left behind. Her father gives her his knapsack to hold her collections of shells and feathers. While Kya waits in vain for her mother's return, she witnesses her older siblings, Missy, Murph, Mandy, and Jodie, all leave as well, due to their father's drinking and physical abuse.Īlone with her father - who temporarily stops drinking - Kya learns to fish. In 1952, six-year-old Catherine Danielle Clark (nicknamed 'Kya') watches her mother abandon her and her family due to violent abuse from her husband, Kya's father Paul.

Where the crawdads sing