At times, her survival in isolation comes close to superheroism, but Owens convincingly depicts the instincts and calculations that get Kya into and out of difficulties. And somewhere in stage schools now are the actors who, playing the young and older Kya, should have a shot at Oscars. The divided timeline – a standard cinematic structure – will also help the screenwriter. These include undersized bullfrogs who hang out with the alpha males with a view to picking up spare females, and the male damselfly, to whom God or Darwin has given a useful scoop that removes the sperm of a prior impregnator to clear the passage for his own.Īs with those Attenborough clips in screen fiction, these anecdotes hover as metaphors for the behaviour of males in the story, and will allow the director of the eventual film to have fun with pointed cutaways. Somewhere in stage schools now are the actors who, playing the young and older Kya, should have a shot at Oscarsīut soon the narrative is satisfyingly reclaimed for older adults when at the local library Kya reads an article entitled “Sneaky Fuckers” in a science journal, which describes deceitful mating strategies. As a result, the tone of the central section sometimes feels like YA, as Kya is instructed by a wise African American woman (one of the supporting characters who flirt with virtuous cliche) in the mysteries of men and menstruation. The rest of the book cuts between the investigation, in which bigoted witnesses incriminate the “swamp girl”, and flashbacks to Kya’s youth and young adulthood, as local suspicion grows that makes the white people dislike her almost as much as they do the residents of the area known, in the prejudiced term of the time, as Colored Town.Īppreciating the fictional limitations of a feral recluse with no vocabulary or life skills, Owens provides tutors for Kya. But Owens knows the tricks of the genre, beginning the novel with a prologue set in 1969 in which a young man has died suspiciously in the swamp.
She also, crucially, observes the dangers of predation in the wild.Īmong the many modern phenomena of which isolated Kya has no inkling is the vast popularity of crime fiction. When, as a teenager, she starts to attract attention from two townie boys, kind working-class Tate and arrogant posh boy Chase, her dating rituals are drawn from observing the sex life of fireflies. Her observation that mother animals and birds always return to their young leads her poignantly to believe that her childhood solitude will be temporary. Photograph: fStop Images GmbH/AlamyĪs a human who knows only nature, all Kya’s reference points come from her surroundings – and her creator’s day job.
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