Books Like Where the Crawdads Sing

Why Each Pick

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The classic it is most often compared with: a small Southern town, an outsider the community has already judged, and a courtroom where prejudice is on trial as much as the defendant. An adult Scout looks back on her childhood, and Kya's story also begins when she is a small child. Harper Lee's novel is warmer and funnier, with Atticus Finch at its moral center, and has no nature writing to speak of.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Another Southern woman who insists on living on her own terms while the town talks about her. Janie tells her friend the story of her three marriages in early twentieth-century Florida, and Hurston's imagery comes from the natural world, from a blossoming pear tree to a hurricane. It is shorter, at 219 pages, written largely in dialect, and centered on Black community life.

Educated by Tara Westover

The true-life echo of Kya's story. Tara Westover grew up in the Idaho mountains with no school, taught herself enough to get into college at seventeen, and went on to Cambridge. Like Kya, she learns that knowledge can carry her away from the people who raised her. It is a memoir, so there is no mystery, but the isolation and self-education feel very close.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

For the part of Crawdads about children left to fend for themselves. Jeannette Walls's parents were brilliant, charismatic and neglectful, and she and her siblings often had to feed and protect themselves, from desert towns to West Virginia. It is a memoir told without self-pity, faster and lighter in tone than Owens, at 288 pages.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The nineteenth-century model for a lonely, mistreated girl who grows into a fiercely independent woman and refuses to be anyone's lesser half. Jane's romance with Mr. Rochester is as charged as Kya's with Tate, and Thornfield holds a secret that unsettles everything. Expect Victorian prose, a gothic mood and 532 pages; the moors stand in for the marsh.

In the Woods by Tana French

For readers who want more of the mystery. A child is found dead at a dig in the Dublin woods where the detective's own two childhood friends vanished twenty years earlier. Like Owens, Tana French gives the landscape a strong presence and cares as much about memory and character as about the solution. It is a police procedural, longer and darker, at 429 pages.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Another small town that turns on a woman it has long considered damaged. A reporter returns to her Missouri hometown to cover the murders of two girls and faces her own family's secrets. It shares Crawdads' sense of a community's cruelty, but it is much darker and shorter, at 254 pages. Content note: self-harm is central to the narrator's story.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

For readers moved by Kya's endurance. Sunja, a poor young woman in early twentieth-century Korea, faces disgrace after an unexpected pregnancy and builds a life for her family in a Japan that treats Koreans as outsiders. It is a multigenerational saga covering most of a century, broader and less intimate than Owens, with no mystery plot.