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Delia Owens is the coauthor of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa - Cry of the Kalahari, The Eye of the Elephant, and Secrets of the Savanna. She has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing and has been published in Nature, the African Journal of Ecology, and International Wildlife, among many other publications. She currently lives in Idaho, where she continues her support for the people and wildlife of Zambia. Where the Crawdads Sing is her first novel.
Delia Owens's website
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What is your debut novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, about?
Where the Crawdads Sing is a mystery, a love story, and a courtroom drama, but it is primarily about self-reliance, survival, and how isolation affects human behavior. Since our species is a social mammal, we have strong genetic tendencies to belong to a group of tightly bonded family and friends.
But what happens if a young girl—such as the novel's heroine, Kya—finds herself alone without a group? Of course, she feels lonely, threatened, insecure, and incompetent. Kya also behaves strangely, hiding behind trees when she sees others on the beach and avoiding the village. She ventures deeper into the wilds of the marsh, away from people, and in so doing begins to learn life's lessons directly from the natural world. This organic guidance, along with instinctual behaviors born from isolation, allow her to survive and protect herself. But much more than that, the confidence she gains from self- reliance permits her to soar with personal achievements beyond what she could imagine.
The novel explores how isolated individuals behave differently from normal and how much we change when rejected by others. On their own and excluded, humans often revert to behaviors ...
Elizabeth J. Church was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Her father, a research chemist, was drafted out of Carnegie Mellon University where he was pursuing his graduate studies and was sent to join other scientists working in... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Where the Crawdads Sing
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The Atomic Weight of Love
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Linda Scott DeRosier has published two memoirs of her life growing up in Appalachia, Creeker and Songs of Life and Grace. She received the Appalachian Writers Association Awared for non-ficition and the Thomas D. Clark Award... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Where the Crawdads Sing
Try:
Creeker
by Linda Scott DeRosier
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