Despite the novel being incredibly successful, the Where the Crawdads Sing movie has some major differences from the book, and that is actually a good thing, playing to the different strengths of its medium. Published in 2018 by author Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing became a mᴀssive success, being selected as part of Reese Witherspoon’s book club just one month after it launched. It has gone on to sell over 18 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. A beloved literary sensation, it was only a matter of time before a movie adaptation.

Just four years after the book was published, Where the Crawdads Sing received a major movie adaptation. Despite Where the Crawdads Sing having a stellar cast led by Daisy Edgar-Jones (Twisters, Normal People), and adapting a beloved novel, the film was met with harsh critical reviews, but ended up being a significant success with audiences, earning over $140 million against a budget of $24 million (via The Numbers). While Where the Crawdads Sing might not necessarily live up to the same beloved status as its novel, it made some changes to the source material, which ultimately served it for the better.

The Movie Condenses Kya’s Childhood

The Novel Takes Its Time To Focus On Her As A Kid

Though Where the Crawdads Sing was at least partially inspired by a true story, it firmly focuses on the fictional character of Kya. One of the first major changes that Where the Crawdads Sing changes when adapting the film is shortening the part of the story that focuses on Kya’s childhood.

The novel sort of acts like a sprawling familial epic regarding Kya’s backstory, taking several chapters to flesh out not only her as a little girl and her close relationship with her older brother Jodie, but also how her parents’ marriage deteriorated to the point where her father eventually becomes the abusive alcoholic he is shown to be in the film.

The movie only takes a little bit of time exploring Kya’s childhood, which makes sense given that there is a lot of story to fill within what is essentially a two-hour film. There is a major difference in the type of storytelling between a novel and a movie, and where the book could get away focusing on a decent amount of time exploring Kya’s childhood, the movie isn’t afforded that luxury, and makes the right choice of framing it as flashbacks when she is telling her lawyer about her story.

Despite not focusing as long on it in the movie, Kya’s childhood is still an important focus in Where the Crawdads Sing and is essential to understanding who she is as a person throughout the rest of the story. If the novel had been adapted into a television series instead, it could have taken more time to do just that, but it was the right choice to keep the pace of the film from becoming too slow.

How Kya Finds Out About Chase’s Engagement

It Hits Even Harder In The Movie

Perhaps the best thing that Where the Crawdads Sing changes from the novel is the way that Kya finds out that Chase is engaged. In the novel, Kya learns about Chase’s engagement by reading its announcement in the local paper. While it makes sense that she would learn about this way, given her tendency to isolate herself, if the movie had her learning about it in the same way, it could emotionally distance the viewer from the revelation. Instead, the film makes her learning about it much more impactful from a purely cinematic standpoint.

After Kya goes into town, she runs into Chase and his friends outside the grocery store, where she learns that he is engaged to a girl named Pearl, spotting the ring on her finger. This scene ends up being incredibly impactful for the humiliation that Kya feels at that moment, realizing that Chase had essentially been using her the entire time they had been together. To him, Kya was just the “Marsh Girl”, and never someone he would actually be with, and when he gets physical with her later on and ᴀssaults her, this initial confrontation makes it even harder to watch.

The Movie Changes Aspects Of Kya’s Literary Career

Her Character Is Given More Agency In Her Career

Kya starts out the movie as illiterate, never having the opportunity to learn to read or write, given the extraordinary circumstances she found herself in early on. After meeting Tate, he begins to teach her these skills, which opens up an entire new world for Kya, one where she begins to draw and write about the marsh and everything she knows about it. The knowledge she has, along with her incredible skill as an artist, allowed her to eventually become a published author in both the novel and the movie, a significant aspect of the story.

How she goes about actually getting published is different between both the movie and the novel. In the novel, Tate gives Kya a list of publishers after he has already come back from college, as an attempt to reconcile their relationship after he left her without warning. In the movie, he gives her a list of publishers before he leaves for college, believing that she is good enough to get published. While Kya uses the money she earns to pay the back taxes on her family’s property in both cases, the movie shifts the process of getting published to her own agency as a character, instead of having Tate do a lot of the work, which continues to show how much she is her own person.

The Where The Crawdads Sing Movie Tweaks The Novel’s Ending

It Leaves It Just A Bit More Ambiguous

The central conflict of Where the Crawdads Sing is Kya on trial for the murder of Chase, and throughout the story, it is unclear if she actually killed him, whether it was an accident, or if Tate was actually the one to do it. While she is found not guilty, the end of both the movie and the novel show that she actually was the one to kill him, finally breaking free of his hold and moving on with her life, especially knowing what he was capable of. The novel and the movie change some things regarding the final reveal.

The movie and novel both end with Tate and Kya living a long and loving life, and after her pᴀssing, Tate finally learns that she killed Chase. Not present in the movie is a poem by Amanda Hamilton (whom Kya often quotes throughout the novel) that Tate discovers under the floorboards that seems a bit like Kya’s confession to killing Chase, especially after learning that Amanda Hamilton was actually a penname that Kya used for herself, revealing that she wrote the poem. That evidence, along with Tate finding her shell necklace, essentially confirms her guilt.

The movie forgoes Amanda Hamilton altogether and only has Tate find the necklace instead, which still shows that she was tied to Chase’s death all along, but the mystery of her killing him and most of her reasoning behind him remains ambiguous. Ending Where the Crawdads Sing on one final mystery for the audience to think about was the right move, and while speaking with The Hollywood Reporter during the movie’s premiere in 2022, writer Lucy Alibar and director Olivia Newman opened up about their decision to omit some things about Chase’s murder, they talked about keeping Kya a bit more of enigma, which works well for the movie, stating:

Newman: I think Kya is a real enigma, and there is something very mysterious about her and so we wanted to maintain that mystery throughout the movie.

Alibar: We wanted to keep it a little more ambiguous honestly because I think life is a little more ambiguous. I think we live in a world now where we become accustomed to a kind of one-tweet answer for so many things and everybody is more complicated than that. Everything is more complicated than that. The world’s more complicated than that.