This post contains spoilers for Where the Crawdads Sing.
At this point, mega producer and book club maven Reese Witherspoon is well-versed in the art of book-to-screen adaptations. After helping to shepherd cinematic versions of Gone Girl, Wild, and Big Little Lies, among others, she’s now produced the splashy, soapy Where the Crawdads Sing, which hit theaters on Friday.
Adapted from the bestselling novel by Delia Owens (who herself has been entangled in a real-life killing), the film follows the reclusive Kya, a woman forced to survive in the North Carolina marsh after being abandoned by her family. Kya is brought to life by Daisy Edgar-Jones, fresh off her turns in Normal People and Under the Banner of Heaven. Amidst her unorthodox coming-of-age, Kya falls for two completely different men: the sensitive Tate (Taylor John Smith) and scheming Chase (Harris Dickinson). The latter winds up dead near a deserted fire tower, and his jilted ex-girlfriend becomes the prime suspect.
Translating any beloved work is a tricky proposition, but screenwriter Lucy Alibar has said she often spoke to Owens about how best to adapt her characters. “I knew I loved Delia immediately because she said, ‘Please don’t ruin the Southern accent—I hate that!’” Alibar told Vanity Fair in March. “Delia trusted all of us to take her baby and put it out there in front of even more people.”
While ever-faithful to its source material, the film version of Where the Crawdads Sing does diverge in a few places. Here are four of the most pressing differences between the book and movie, including a departure in Kya’s ending.
Kya’s Childhood
As with any book-to-screen adaptation, some of the novel’s more detailed storylines must be condensed. The section that gets the most chopping is Kya’s childhood, which takes up several chapters in the book but only about 20 minutes of the movie. This means much of the context for Ma’s (Ahna O’Reilly) exodus from her family, and the abuse by Pa (Garret Dillahunt) that forces all of his children but young Kya (Jojo Regina) to leave, is erased.
As the book explains, the couple’s marriage was ravaged by the Great Depression, which led to Pa’s gambling addiction and alcoholism. The film doesn’t provide a reason for Pa’s abusive nature, nor does it flesh out the close-knit bond Kya shares with her older brother Jodie (Will Bundon). Kya’s arrest in the murder of Chase Andrews also happens far earlier in the movie, which frames her childhood anecdotes as flashbacks told to her lawyer (David Strathairn) rather than its own segment.
Chase’s Engagement
When Tate leaves for college, he and Kya’s relationship (temporarily) ends, providing an opening for Barkley Cove’s most problematic bachelor. Enter Chase Andrews, who romances Kya in secret while publicly referring to her as “the Marsh Girl” and talking about her in a sexually derogatory manner. In the book, Kya discovers that Chase is engaged after seeing his wedding announcement in the newspaper. The film makes this reveal decidedly more cinematic by having Kya run into Chase and his friends outside of a grocery store, one of whom identifies herself as Pearl (Caroline Cole)—Chase’s fiancée.
Kya’s Literary Career
“I wasn’t aware that words could hold so much,” Kya says in both the book and movie after Tate teaches her to read. In the months after becoming literate, Kya begins drawing and writing about the nature that surrounds her in the marsh. Both the novel and movie have Tate provide Kya with a list of potential publishers so that her work can be seen. In the book, Tate shares this list after he’s already left for college and returned as a means of reconciling with Kya. The film has Tate making this gesture—one that Kya doesn’t consider until she needs the money to pay back taxes on her property—before he heads to school. Facing foreclosure, Kya is motivated to get her novels published for her own financial security rather than simply as a means of sharing her insights with the world.
Tate proves to be a wealth of knowledge for Kya. In addition to teaching her how to read and get her books published, the book version of Tate also explains to Kya what her period is. This scene is (mercifully?) missing from the movie adaptation.
The Ending
Don’t fret, book purists—the surprising twist ending of Crawdads, in which it’s revealed that an exonerated Kya did, in fact, murder Chase, remains intact. However, the way that an advanced-age Tate discovers this revelation shifts. In the book, Tate discovers a poem written by Amanda Hamilton, the poet Kya often quotes, underneath their floorboards. Titled The Firefly, the piece contains a metaphor about female fireflies killing their mates and reads as a thinly-veiled confession. Tate also finds the shell necklace that Chase was wearing in the hours before his murder, leading him to realize that Kya did commit the crime. Of course, this means that Amanda Hamilton was a pseudonym that his now-deceased wife used for her poetry.
The film takes Amanda Hamilton out of the equation. Instead, Tate finds a journal with sketches of himself, Kya, and Chase alongside the shell necklace taped to a page. In both the book and movie Tate vows to keep Kya’s secret, disposing of the shell into a rising tide.
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