Delia Owens’ 2018 novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, tells the story of Catherine “Kya” Clark, who’s forced to fend for herself after her mother, siblings, and abusive father all abandon her. The resourceful young girl lives in a small, isolated house in a North Carolina marsh during the 1950s, and she survives by selling mussels and smoked fish to a local merchant. The nearest small town has a school; she attends for one day, but can’t tolerate the kids’ ridicule of her poor clothes and lack of education, and quickly goes back to her reclusive ways. One boy is nice to her, though: Tate Walker, who visits, teaches her to read, and is generally smitten by her; she not only shares his fascination with nature but also has a talent for drawing pictures of the local wildlife. He eventually goes off to college to become a natural scientist and doesn’t keep a promise to come back and see her. Kya is devastated, but finds solace in a lucrative deal with a publisher, who improbably gives her an advance of thousands of dollars for her illustrated guide to marsh fauna. She also seeks comfort in the arms of former high-school football star Chase Andrews, who isn’t as nice as Tate is. Later, when Chase turns up dead, the local townsfolk are sure that Kya killed him.

The novel was a huge bestseller after it was picked for Reese Witherspoon’s popular book club, and Witherspoon is now a producer of a new movie adaptation, starring Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya. It premieres in theaters on July 15.

Owens’ novel is a mostly straightforward tale of triumph over adversity, although Kya’s solitary life in the marsh isn’t portrayed as particularly taxing. Most of the time, she simply communes with the nature around her, and its many creatures do her no harm. Apparently, it’s a magical place where a child can step on a rusty nail and suffer no ill effects from treating a dangerous puncture wound with salt water and mud. Overall, the story is an idealistic riff on the old myth of the feral child, in which civilized folk, not nature, are the real problem.

Owens clearly loves the North Carolina marsh setting and can’t resist a twangy, Southern turn of phrase—starting with the title itself, which appears multiple times in the text. (Tate defines the phrase as “far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters.” Basically, yonder.) At one point, young Kya, seeing a storm gathering, says that it’s “gonna rain bullfrogs,” and at another, a trial witness—in sworn testimony, no less—describes Kya as not merely angry but as “[m]ad as a mule chewin’ bumblebees.” (Fans of the Nickelodeon show Spongebob Squarepants may be reminded of squirrel scientist Sandy Cheeks’ exaggerated regionalisms.)

There’s a lot of local color, to be sure, but not a lot of people of color. The few that have significant roles seem to exist primarily to show kindness to the poor White girl. They include a man nicknamed Jumpin’, who kindly buys the mussels and fish that tiny Kya brings him—making it narratively possible for her to survive all by herself—and his “good-sized wife,” Mabel, whose most significant role in the story is to make adolescent Kya comfortable about the menstruation experience: “You’re a woman now, baby.” Nearly everything they do and say and think relates to the protagonist, who seems to be on a lot of other people’s minds, as well.

Other people’s opinions of Kya seem to fall mainly into two camps—fawning admiration or classist contempt. Tate and Chase are both obsessed with the young woman, a willowy beauty who attracts ’em like flies to a jug o’ blackstrap molasses. However, the snooty townsfolk turn up their nose at the “Marsh Girl,” whom they believe to be crawling with disease. Readers, it’s made clear, should be wowed by Kya; after all, she not only survived abuse and destitution but also became a successful author of nature books, a published poet, and an amazing illustrator, despite a complete lack of training. When she’s eventually put on trial for murder, readers can’t possibly believe that Owens would put Kya into any situation she couldn’t survive with stunning grace—and while reciting her own poems to herself.

The film, directed by First Match’s Olivia Newman and adapted by Beasts of the Southern Wild’s Lucy Alibar, is extraordinarily faithful to the source material, with long stretches of dialogue transferred verbatim, which will please fans of the novel. But some of its decisions only raise further questions; Kya’s place, which is smack in the middle of muddy marshland, is bizarrely clean. No one is that tidy. Indeed, the whole movie is set in a version of the past where everyone’s clothes seem brand-new and everyone’s skin is improbably spotless.

The actors, particularly Edgar-Jones and David Strathairn as Kya’s Atticus Finch–like attorney, acquit themselves well, although the former’s reserved, inward acting style can’t sell some of Kya’s more dramatic declarations; a fiery jail-cell speech, in which she condemns the prejudiced townsfolk, just feels forced. Perhaps most distracting, though, is the film’s breakneck pace, which rushes through plot points like a hound-dog with its tail on fire. The novel, by contrast, is a languid, atmospheric affair, which gets across the marsh’s lazy splendor with aplomb. This choice is most noticeable at the end of the movie, when a major revelation—one on which the whole story turns—feels like a brisk afterthought. One wishes that the filmmakers would have lingered just a bit more on the nature that Kya so loves—out there, where critters are wild, still behaving like critters.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.