Where the Crawdads Sing: The 4 Biggest Changes From Book to Movie

This post contains spoilers for Where the Crawdads sing.

At this point, the mega-producer and book club maven Reese Witherspoon is versed in the art of book-to-screen adaptations. After helping frame the film versions of missing girl, Savageand big little lies, among other things, it was now producing the splashing and soapy Where the Crawdads sing, which hits theaters on Friday.

Adapted from the best-selling novel by Delia Owens (who herself was entangled in the investigation of a real murder), the film follows the reclusive Kya, a woman forced to survive in the North Carolina swamp after being abandoned by her family. Kya is hosted by Daisy Edgar Jones, freshly landed normal people and Under the banner of heaven. In the midst of her unorthodox coming of age, Kya falls in love with two completely different men: the sensitive Tate (Taylor John Smith) and the intriguing Chase (Harris Dickinson). The latter finds himself dead near a deserted fire tower, and his abandoned ex-girlfriend becomes the main suspect.

Translating any beloved work is a tricky proposition, but the screenwriter Lucy Alibar said she often talks to Owens about how best to adapt her characters. I knew straight away that I liked Delia because she said to me: Please don’t ruin the Southern accent, I hate it! Alibar said vanity lounge in March. Delia trusted us to take her baby and introduce him to even more people.

Although still faithful to its sources, the film version of Where the Crawdads sing diverges in a few places. Here are four of the most pressing differences between the book and the movie, including a departure at the end of Kyas.

Childhood Kyas

As with any book-to-screen adaptation, some of the novels’ more detailed stories need to be condensed. The section that gets the most choppy is Kya’s childhood, which takes up several chapters of the book but only about 20 minutes of the movie. This means a lot of the context for Mas (Ahna OReilly) the exodus of his family and the abuses of Pa (Garret Dillahunt) which obliges all his children except the 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 gambling addiction and alcoholism. The film doesn’t provide a reason for Pas’ abusive nature, nor does it flesh out the close bond Kya shares with her older brother Jodie (Will Bundon). Kya’s arrest in the Chase Andrews murder also occurs much earlier in the film, which features anecdotes from her childhood as flashbacks told to her lawyer (David Strathairn) rather than its own segment.

Continuation of the commitment

When Tate leaves for college, her relationship with Kyas ends (temporarily), providing an opening for Barkley Coves’ most problematic bachelor. Enter Chase Andrews, who secretly romances Kya while publicly calling her a Marsh Girl and talking about her in a sexually derogatory way. In the book, Kya finds out that Chase is engaged after seeing his wedding announcement in the newspaper. The film makes this revelation decidedly more cinematic by having Chase and his friends meet outside a grocery store, one of whom identifies as Pearl (Caroline Cole)Prosecutions fiance.

Kyas’ literary career

I had no idea words could hold so much, Kya says in the book and film after Tate taught her to read. In the months following her literacy, Kya began to draw and write about the nature around her in the swamp. Both the novel and the film require Tate to provide Kya with a list of potential publishers so her work can be seen. In the book, Tate shares this list after he’s already left for college and returned as a way to reconcile with Kya. In the movie, Tate makes this move that Kya doesn’t consider until she needs the money to pay off the taxes on her property.before He goes to school. Facing foreclosure, Kya is motivated to have her novels published for her own financial security rather than simply as a way to share her ideas with the world.

Tate proves to be a wealth of knowledge for Kya. Along with teaching her how to read and get her books published, Tate’s book version also teaches Kya about her rules. This scene is (fortunately?) absent from the film adaptation.

The end

Don’t worry, book purists the surprising ending of crawdads = crawfish, in which it was revealed that an exonerated Kya had, in fact, murdered Chase, remains intact. However, how an elderly Tate finds out about this revelation changes. In the book, Tate discovers a poem written by Amanda Hamilton, the poet Kya often quotes, under their boards. Titled The Firefly, the piece contains a metaphor about female fireflies killing their mates and reads like a thinly veiled confession. Tate also finds the shell necklace that Chase wore in the hours before his murder, leading him to realize that Kya committed the crime. Of course, that means Amanda Hamilton was a pseudonym 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 next to the shell necklace taped to a page. In both the book and the movie, Tate swears to keep Kyas a secret, tossing the shell into a rising tide.