Fans of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing—a group that numbers in the millions—got their first look at the upcoming film adaptation this week.
The movie version of Owens’ unstoppable 2018 novel, which blends romance and murder in 1950s North Carolina, has been hotly anticipated since Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, announced it in early 2020. The first stills from the film, published on Vanity Fair’s website on Monday, suggest a verdant, golden-hour vibe as the novel’s hero, Kya (played by Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones), navigates the Carolina marshlands.
Or someplace close enough to them: Though the novel is set in the Tar Heel state, filming took place last year in and around New Orleans. Witherspoon, who also selected Crawdads for her book club, told Vanity Fair that she sees Crawdads as a broader Southern tale.
“The way that Delia Owens wrote this book with such authenticity, you could tell she really grew up in this place,” Witherspoon said. “She really appreciated the nature around her. The book is a love letter to growing up in the South, which for me really resonated because I grew up in New Orleans and Nashville.”
The article notes that to date, Crawdads has sold more than 12 million copies—an unlikely hit for Owens, a zoologist whose previous books were nonfiction titles about African animals, cowritten with her then-husband, Mark.
The movie, directed by Olivia Newman and scripted by Lucy Alibar, is schedule for release in theaters on July 22.
Mark Athitakis is a journalist in Phoenix who writes about books for Kirkus, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.
