If you loved the thick, humid, but strangely serene swamps of Where the Crawdads Sing, you’ll feel right at home in the mists of The Marsh King’s Daughter.
Before We Were Yours has many similarities, including beautiful prose, a setting that will sweep you away, and ongoing themes of love, survival, and making your path in the world. It’s also just enough of a thriller to be a real page-turner!
It offers both humor and heart as it explores the dynamics of family, memory, loss, trauma, and recovery. Like many other books like Where the Crawdads Sing, it’s also chock-full of homespun wisdom that can only come from born-and-bred southerners.
Both books have estranged fathers, missing husbands, and absent brothers, leaving the women to center stage. While their settings might be different, the struggles of female heroines are at the heart of both novels.