In Where the Crawdads Sing (2018), author and zoologist Delia Owens paints a lush picture of the untamed coastal wetlands of North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s, and an even richer portrait of the life of Kya Clark, who dwells and matures mostly on her own in that setting, at one with the nature and wildlife.

At the point Kya meets the tender and intellectual Tate, she has only ever been to school for one day, and never learned to read. Tate takes it upon himself to teach her the alphabet and how to sound out words, which she practices using Alan Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949).

The moment Kya learns to read is a self-reflexive gem in the trove of Owens’ prose, which has an elastic capacity to be both plainly stated and teeming with its own abundance:

Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: “‘There are some who can live without wild things, and there are some who cannot.’”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again where you can’t read.”

“It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. ‘“I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.”

The depth of Kya’s world view breaking wide open into new realms of meaning, through one line in which she sees herself reflected—the first line she ever reads—is so ‘full’ in itself, it’s almost too bountiful to bear.