'Where the Crawdads Sing' Review: Literary Sensation Becomes Brilliant Summer Popcorn Movie

We may never know the full truth about Delia Owens' checkered past as a conservationist - which almost certainly seems to include a militant, white savior-minded approach to policing. Zambian wildlife sanctuaries, and may also extend to murder - but the secret to the author's success "Where the Crawdads Sing" is now as obvious as her plot, even to those of us who had never heard talking about the runaway bestseller until Taylor Swift invented it a few weeks ago. Olivia Newman's slick and shiny beach read ("First Match") from a film adaptation brings it all to the surface. Which is just as well, because the surface is the only layer of this film.

Yes, it's a cleverly crafted melodrama about the challenge of being abandoned, and of course, it's also a slightly self-exempt caricature of a natural woman untouched by Western society. But beneath the story's wet romance with the Carolina swamps and behind its Hollywood backwater Americana facade, "Where the Crawdads Sing" is really just a swampy riff on "Pygmalion," with Eliza Doolittle reimagined as a semi-wild outsider who is obviously the sexiest girl in town, but lives in near complete seclusion until Barkley Cove's Zack Siler teaches her to read and kiss.

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Simplified from its source material using a script by Lucy Aliber that embraces the moss of Owens' book while turning down the heat of its flowery storytelling, nature is my real mom< /em>, the movie version of "Where the Crawdads Sing" is much more fun as a hothouse page-turner than a moving tale of female self-sufficiency. That he'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 remained in their isolated North Carolina home until the day Dad died in the 1950s, Kya spent her childhood watching the people who loved her leave one-by-one (she is played as a child by Jojo Regina). Alone from a young age, and dehumanized in folklore by the "normal" people of the town - especially children, who call her "Marsh Girl" and laugh her to the swamp when she shows up at school without shoes - 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).

Several years later, she would be taken to Barkley Cove prison and forced to stand trial for the murder of a pasty mugger named Chase Andrews; it is there, at the behest of the retired lawyer (David Strathairn!) who takes her case out of the goodness of her heart, that Kya is finally forced to share her life story for the first time, her voiceover guiding us through the past in snippets of overloaded evocative prose that establish its connection to nature. "Marsh is a space of light," she coos, "where grass grows in water and water flows in the sky." In a real time is a flat circle, it often feels like Kya taught herself to write by reading all the other novels that have been canonized by the club book by Reese Witherspoon.

Of course Kya is self-sufficient and capable, we soon learn that she learned her letters with the help of the sweet, square-jawed boy who grew up along the creek. The Dawson Leery to Kya's Joey Potter, Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) is a caring soul who lost his own family, which might explain why he always remembered the orphaned girl everyone in Barkley Cove had. eager to forget. The summer before college, Tate begins leaving Kya's supplies on a tree stump—as if filling a food trap for a wild animal—only to find that the Marsh Girl has become a movie star. It's a real honor for Newman to handle the silly, serious tone of her movie that she allows Kya, who has no electricity or running water, to look like she's spent all her mussel money. on Pantene Pro-V. Either way, the kisses ensue. Sometimes in the middle of a vortex of leaves in slow motion.