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Winner of the 2012 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
One of the New York Times Book Review's Top 10 Books of 2011
“If no such thing as the Great Floridian Novel already existed, consider it done. . . . A novel of idiosyncratic and eloquent language; hyperreal, Technicolor settings; and larger-than-life characters who are nonetheless heartbreakingly vulnerable and keenly emotional. It’s a tour de force.” —Elle
“Beautiful, dark, and funny.” —Rolling Stone
“A spook-house masterpiece.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Dazzlingly original. . . . Like the state itself, Swamplandia! is a crossroads where the wild and the tame, the spectacular and the mundane meet; underneath the hubbub of the fantastic lies a family of misfits at sea in their grief—theirs is a story that is as ordinary as it is heartbreaking.” —Boston Globe
“Wonderfully imaginative.” —The Seattle Times
“A rich and humid world of spirits and dreams, buzzing mosquitoes and prehistoric reptiles, baby-green cocoplums and marsh rabbits, and musty old tomes about heroes and spells. With Ava [Russell] has created a goofy and self-conscious girl who is young enough to hope that all darkness has an answering lightness.” —The Economist
“A lusciously written phantasmagorical treat.” —Palm Beach Post
“Swamplandia! flashes brilliantly—holographically—between a surreal tale brimming with sophisticated whimsy and an all-too-realistic portrait of a quaint but dysfunctional family under pressure in a world that threatens to make them obsolete. . . . Ava is a true contemporary heroine and not easily forgotten.” —More
“Winningly told.” —Vogue
“Audacious, beguiling. . . . Ava’s story turns into a tale that could have been concocted by Flannery O’Connor in partnership with the Brothers Grimm—in other words, a first-class nightmare. . . . You will admire this novel for its prose, but you will love it for its big heart.” —The Daily Beast
“Ava’s juicy, poetic voice, assembled through sheer willpower and joie de vivre and desperation from a self-taught young genius’s love of language, is what carries this book. . . . [A] garish and fierce beauty.” —Salon
“The talent Karen Russell paraded in her remarkable short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves has turned into mastery.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“Swamplandia! is both a celebration of the Everglades and an elegy for it. . . . Russell has created a credible, captivating universe.” —The Sun Sentinel
“Think Scout Finch if she’d been raised in an old-school tourist attraction instead of a tiny town. Or Dorothy if a tornado had dropped her in the Everglades instead of Oz. Or Alice if she had tumbled into a Wonderland populated by gators and ghosts and a man in a coat made of feathers. . . . A story rich in fantastic images and gorgeous language, anchored . . . by its wonderfully human characters and its big, warm heart.” —St. Petersburg Times
“A rich, lively narrative (sometimes silly, sometimes sad) with gorgeous language. . . . Russell’s debut novel shines with the glow of the southern sun.” —The Oregonian
“Funny, sorrowful, and engrossing. . . . Hardly a page goes by without the reader marveling. . . . An adventure story, a tale of family, a testament to resilience and an account of America’s homogenization, Swamplandia! is an accomplished and affecting debut.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Unlike any story you’re familiar with. . . . A mesmerizing gothic portrait of love, death, and the loss of innocence.” —The Gainesville Times
“Russell’s writing is clear, rhythmic and dependable, even as her imagination runs wild.” —Los Angeles Times
“An astonishingly assured first novel.” —The Washington Times
“Some novels pull readers forward with plots that demand resolution; others make them want to linger on each sentence, bathing in the delights. Swamplandia! . . . does both, leaving readers with a sweet dilemma: Appreciate the present or forge on to find out what happens next.” —The Columbus Dispatch
“There’s simply no question that Russell writes beautifully, even about the darkest of truths.” —Time Out Chicago
“May be the best book you’ll ever read about a girl trying to save her family’s alligator-wrestling theme park.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Satisfying and heart-warming.” —Florida Times-Union
“Gorgeously written. . . . Russell’s flirtation with the fantastic adds a dangerous, off-kilter edge.” —Bookforum
“Intensely moving.”—The Onion’s A.V. Club, Grade: A
“[Russell’s] prose dazzles in any medium.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Russell’s prose is beautiful, vivid, and lovingly creepy—just like Florida itself. . . . Magnificent.” —The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
“[A] wonderfully overstuffed, scaldingly funny, and frightening debut. . . . Read this book, pass it on to those who deserve it, and be thankful that the world contains artists like Karen Russell.” —PopMatters.com
“Exuberant, big-hearted, and entertaining. . . . In the midst of making readers think, Russell also makes us laugh, cry and gasp as she concocts an amazing and undiscovered world and populates it with characters we come to care for deeply. You’ll want to savor the sentences in this literary triumph.” —Maclean’s
A debut novel from Russell (stories: St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, 2006) about female alligator wrestlers, ghost boyfriends and a theme park called World of Darkness.
Ava Bigtree is experiencing some hard times in making it through her childhood. Her mother Hilola, a world-class alligator wrestler at the family tourist compound Swamplandia! (which Russell always writes with an exclamation point), died of cancer, so business has fallen off considerably. Perhaps even more significant, World of Darkness recently opened and started draining away customers from Swamplandia! Because the Bigtree family business was on an island off the coast of Florida, no one in the family had much experience with mainland life. Ava, who narrates roughly half the book, would like to follow in her mother's alligator-wrestling footsteps, but her age prevents her from reviving the business. Her brother Kiwi joins the forces of evil, as it were, by taking a job at World of Darkness—one of its big draws is the Leviathan, a ride in which tourists slide down a seemingly saliva-soaked tongue of a giant whale—but also by getting the education he lacked on the island. Kiwi hopes to send money home but finds after meeting all the exploitative fees charged by his boss that he has almost nothing left. Ava's sister Ossie (short for Osceola—she's named after the Florida Indian tribe) starts paying close attention to the results of a Ouija board, finds an old dredge in the swamps near her home, and goes off with the ghost of Louis Thanksgiving, who had died in the swamps years before. Meanwhile, the patriarch of the Bigtree clan, known as the Chief, abandons the whole sorry business and finds a job at a mainland casino. The narrative becomes a quest of sorts as Ava, accompanied by a bizarre character called the Bird Man, poles through the swamps in a mythic attempt to locate her sister. Throughout this search, Russell evokes archetypal journeys through underworlds and across the Styx.
Quirky, outlandish fiction: To say it's offbeat is to seriously underestimate its weirdness.
From Paul Di Filippo's "THE SPECULATOR" column on The Barnes & Noble Review
To warp Tolstoy's famous line: "Sane families are all alike; every crazy family is crazy in its own way."
The literary trope of a tightly bound family or pseudo-family of grotesque, outré and outcast individuals operating as performers, or denizens of some cloistered Gothic environment, who serve in their eccentric manner as a symbolic commentary on society at large, has a long and prestigious lineage. Today the tradition is handsomely capped by Karen Russell's gonzo debut novel, Swamplandia!
We might peg the first truly modern such instance to Tod Browning's 1932 film Freaks, with its cast of pinheads, little people, and amputees, all allied against the "normal" world. Three years later Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao, introduced the supernatural elements which often appear in subsequent treatments of the theme. Our next landmark, from 1946,William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley, proved that a trashcan mimesis was quite sufficient to produce free-floating weirdness. This same era saw the uncanny flourishing, in their original New Yorker cartoon form, of The Addams Family. A decade later, Robert Bloch's Psycho, from 1959, offered the most stripped-down version of the crazed nuclear family, a one-member (or is it a two-member?) clan, whose motel is after all an entertainment facility of sorts.
Inspired by Addams, Ray Bradbury delivered his own tales of the similar Elliott family, starting with 1946's "The Homecoming," and pursued the pure circus form of the theme in his 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Coincidentally that same year, Shirley Jackson reasserted the creepiness of twisted and demented naturalism with We Have Always Lived in the Castle. From that definitive milestone, it was a fairly long leap to Ian McEwan's 1978 upping of the ante with The Cement Garden, and a comparable stretch before Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine in 1985 and Katherine Dunn's Geek Love in 1989.
Perhaps discouraged by the hefty and exhaustive accomplishments of this majestic honor roll, authors have not ventured into this territory recently in great numbers. But two major admirable exceptions exist: the 1997 novel Dogland by Will Shetterly, in which the narrator recounts his adolescent years helping to run a Florida roadside tourist attraction dedicated to exhibiting every dog breed in creation; and Jeffrey Ford's 2008 book, The Shadow Year, where a set of off-kilter siblings must deal not only with parental ineptitude but also murderous supernatural intrusions into their Bradburyesque town.
Sharing this noble literary bloodline of familial battiness, Karen Russell's exotic Bigtree clan comes out at the top of the weirdo heap. They operate a shabby gator-wrestling establishment on an island mired in Florida's swampy backwaters -- carnies of a sort, united against rubes and "mainlander" types. The paterfamilias, Chief Bigtree, has his heart and soul sunk into the ancestral place, as did his late wife, Hilola. (Her spectral presence, more imagined than real, haunts the characters and the book.) The teenage children, naturally, exhibit mixed feelings about their quirky destiny. Older daughter Ossie is a dreamy type, frustrated enough in her budding carnality to fall in love with ghosts. Son Kiwi is all naïve practicality and has a desire to engage with the larger world. And youngest daughter Ava -- well, she's the most complex one of them all, befitting her status as our lush-voiced narrator, layering her adult sensibilities and vocabulary over this account of a few pivotal months in the history of Swamplandia! (the exclamation point is an inextricable element of their attraction's name).
Russell's zany density of setting, action, and characterization had obviously been steeping for some time. In 2006, she appeared in Zoetrope All-Story magazine with "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," a vignette involving Ava and Ossie temporarily on their own. (The tale now serves as a kind of alternate history to the events of the novel.) This story prominently opened Russell's collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Two other pieces -- "Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows" and "Out to Sea" -- also figured at least tangentially in the Bigtree mythos. Overall, the wild-eyed fables here gleefully illustrate youthful strainings against the limits of society and consensus normality. At times Russell's work echoes that of George Saunders, though with a brighter, less mordant affect. (In fact, Saunders gets a shout-out on the acknowledgment page.)
Russell is no miniaturist or minimalist, but rather the opposite, heir to a Southern tradition of tall tales, thick descriptions, deep backstories, and contrary cusses as anti-heroes. (Think of A Confederacy of Dunces as the template for such outrageous saintly fools.) Her theme of the onerous weight of a family's destiny would not be out of place in any Faulkner production. Neither is she shy about heaping on the plot. By the end of Chapter One, we've already been introduced to all the family dynamics and much of its history, and seen the threat on the horizon, which is a rival amusement park on the mainland called the "World of Darkness."
After grounding us brilliantly and intimately in the geography of the place known as Swamplandia! -- both its contemporary physical and psychological terrain, nuanced with some fascinating Florida history -- Russell makes the brave move of fragmenting the gestalt. Ossie and Kiwi run away separately, the Chief goes missing, and Ava is left alone on the island. Then arrives a mysterious figure, the Bird Man, who Ava is convinced can help track down her specter-misled sister, and the pair set off on a creepy odyssey whose mythic elements recall such larger-than-life quests as the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, Frodo's wanderings, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Meanwhile, half the narrative is now concerned with Kiwi's misadventures on the mainland while working at World of Darkness. This portion of the book, while highly amusing in a satirical manner that rags on many modern absurdities, lacks the epic and feverish derangement of Ava's adventures -- although, to be fair, Russell unites the two strands at the end very satisfactorily.
By expelling the characters from the safety of their shell, their self-constructed refuge or paradise or Eden, however shabby, Russell calls to mind another classic novel of familial insanity in a Gothic setting: Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Her expulsion of Ava and Kiwi into the "real world" has much the same force and flavor as the final volume in Peake's cycle, Titus Alone.
Russell privileges a kind of idioglossia, the special language and set of associations known only to the Bigtree clan, fabulators all. (The very American trait of creating one's own identity is an explicit riff in the book as well.) For instance, the Bigtrees dub all gators "Seth," resulting in quite a few surreal sentences, such as: "A tiny, fiery Seth. Her skull was the exact shape and shining hue of a large halved strawberry." Ava's juicy, poetic voice, assembled through sheer willpower and joie de vivre and desperation from a self-taught young genius's love of language, is what carries this book even more so than the bizarre events. Without rendering Ava as some sort of impossible freak, Russell nonetheless employs subtle craft to highlight her uniqueness born of isolation and dreaminess. In a way, Ava is kin to the "girls raised by wolves" from the title story in Russell's collection.
If you were to take the exuberantly fecund tropical paintings of Martin Johnson Heade and commission the ghost of Angela Carter to write a story based on them, you might very well end up with something approaching the garish and fierce beauty of Swamplandia!
My family, the Bigtree tribe of the Ten Thousand Islands, once lived on a hundred-acre island off the coast of southwest Florida, on the Gulf side of the Great Swamp. For many years, Swamplandia! was the Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café in the area. We leased an expensive billboard on the interstate, just south of Cape Coral: COME SEE "SETH," FANGSOME SEA SERPENT AND ANCIENT LIZARD OF DEATH!!! We called all our alligators Seth. (“Tradition is as important, kids,” Chief Bigtree liked to say, “as promotional materials are expensive.”) The billboard featured a ten-foot alligator, one of the Seths, hissing soundlessly. Its jaws gape to reveal the rosebud pink of a queen conch shell; its scales are a wet-looking black. We Bigtrees are kneeling around the primordial monster in reverse order of height: my father, the Chief; my grandfather, Sawtooth; my mother, Hilola; my older brother, Kiwi; my sister, Osceola; and finally, me. We are wearing Indian costumes on loan from our Bigtree Gift Shop: buckskin vests, cloth headbands, great blue heron feathers, great white heron feathers, chubby beads hanging off our foreheads and our hair in braids, gator “fang” necklaces.
Although there was not a drop of Seminole or Miccosukee blood in us, the Chief always costumed us in tribal apparel for the photographs he took. He said we were “our own Indians.” Our mother had a toast-brown complexion that a tourist could maybe squint and call Indian—and Kiwi, Grandpa Sawtooth, and I could hold our sun. But my sister, Osceola, was born snowy—not a weak chamomile blond but pure frost, with eyes that vibrated somewhere between maroon and violet. Her face was like our mother’s face cast forward onto cloudy water. Before we posed for the picture on that billboard, our mother colored her in with drugstore blusher. The Chief made sure she was covered by the shadow of a tree. Kiwi liked to joke that she looked like the doomed sibling you see in those Wild West daguerreotypes, the one who makes you think, Oh God, take the picture quick; that kid is not long for this world.
Our park housed ninety-eight captive alligators in the Gator Pit. We also had a Reptile Walk, a two-mile-long boardwalk through the paurotis palms and saw grass that my grandfather and father designed and built. There you could see caimans, gharials, Burmese and Afri- can pythons, every variety of tree frog, a burrow hole of red-bellied ?turtles and lachrymose morning glories, and a rare Cuban crocodile, ?Methuselah—a croc that was such an expert mimic of a log that it had moved only once in my presence, when its white jaw fell open like a suitcase.
We had one mammal, Judy Garland, a small, balding Florida brown bear who had been rescued as a cub by my grandparents, back when bears still roamed the pinewoods of the northern swamp. Judy Garland’s fur looked like a scorched rug—my brother said she had ursine alopecia. She could do a trick, sort of: the Chief had trained her to nod along to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Everybody, without exception, hated this trick. Her Oz-nods terrified small children and shocked their parents. “Somebody, help! This bear is having a seizure!” the park guests would cry—the bear had bad rhythm—but we had to keep her, said the Chief. The bear was family.
Our park had an advertising campaign that was on par with the best of the aqua-slide attractions and the miniature golf courses; we had the cheapest beer in a three-county radius; and we had wrestling shows 365 days a year, rain or shine, no federal holidays, no Christian or pagan interruptions. We Bigtrees had our problems, too, of course, like ?anybody—Swamplandia! had been under siege from several enemy forces, natural and corporate, for most of my short lifetime. We islanders worried about the menace of the melaleuca woods—the melaleuca, or paperbark tree, was an exotic invasive species that was draining huge tracts of our swamp to the northeast. And everybody had one eye on the sly encroachment of the suburbs and Big Sugar in the south. But it always seemed to me like my family was winning. We had never been defeated by the Seths. Every Saturday evening (and most weeknights!) of our childhoods, our mom performed the Swimming with the Seths act and she always won. For a thousand shows, we watched our mother sink into black water, rise. For a thousand nights, we watched the green diving board quaking in air, in the bright wake of her.
And then our mom got sick, sicker than a person should ever be allowed to get. I was twelve when she got her diagnosis and I was furious. There is no justice and no logic, the cancer doctors cooed around me; I don’t remember the exact words they used, but I could not decode a note of hope. One of the nurses brought me chocolate duds from the vending machine that stuck in my throat. These doctors were always stooping to talk to us, or so it seemed to me, like every doctor on her ward was a giant, seven or eight feet tall. Mom fell through the last stages of her cancer at a frightening speed. She no longer resembled our mother. Her head got soft and bald like a baby’s head. We had to watch her sink into her own face. One night she dove and she didn’t come back. Air cloaked the hole that she left and it didn’t once tremble, no bubbles, it seemed she really wasn’t going to surface. Hilola Jane Bigtree, world-class alligator wrestler, terrible cook, mother of three, died in a dryland hospital bed in West Davey on an overcast Wednesday, March 10, at 3:12 p.m.
From the Hardcover edition.
Florida is known for some of the oddest tourist attractions (some might say traps) on the planet. The state is home to Swamplandia where Bigtree alligator-wrestling has gone on for ages. However, several recent setbacks place the family business in jeopardy as the once popular stop appears heading to bankrupt extinction.
There are talent issues as the star wrestler Hilia who brought in the masses to watch a female pin alligators recently died. The older daughter Ossie has fallen in love and elopes with a ghost of a man. Adding insult their brother Kiwi accepts a position as janitor at their more powerfully backed rival the World of Darkness. Finally the patriarch Chief Bigtree has vanished. Thus the youngest sibling thirteen years old Ava takes over her late mom's spot as the show must go on, but lacks her glamour and experience and besides has to herd just under a hundred gators and care for the park while controlling her grief. However, all changes when Ava believes she must rescue her father trapped in hell otherwise known as Gulf of Mexico; her allies are Grandpa Sawtooth, the Bird Man, and her BFF the midget alligator; at stake is her dad, the park and their island.
This is a wonderful odd fantasy with the key players fully substantial that they bring core realism to the capricious tale. Obviously this is Ava's saga but the support cast enhances her save her world story line. Readers who enjoy something cutting edge different will want Swamplandia! Tour guide Karen Russell escorting them around the island, the park, and the Gulf in this enchanting but strange thriller (see St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves anthology for more entertainingly refreshing)tales.
Harriet Klausner
13 out of 18 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Maggie83
Posted February 10, 2011
I enjoyed Swamplandia! but it is not a book I would really recommend. It's merit is in it's characters. All are individually interesting and vibrant and even more so when thought of as a family. Russell goes into wonderful detail explaning the the rich and colorful Bigtree family and their Seths. It's the plot that's lacking! The first, descriptive, half of the book is fabulous, but so much more could've been done with the second half. The plotline gets confusing. I foudn myself asking "WHERE IS THIS BOOK GOING?" Not enough attention is paid to individual storylines and although the book felt too long, there needed to be more at the end. What happened to Ossie during her journey w/LT? What happened to the Birdman? What happened to Ava? What happened to Swamplandia!? While Russell touches upon all these questions, she doesn't fully answer them. You feel connected & interested to the characters and their sagas. You wonder about their fates, and then BOOM. THE END. This book needed more. That being said, I did LIKE it, but not enough to confidently recommend it to anyone.
8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.LCJB
Posted March 22, 2011
I'm still trying to figure out why this book has been popular. Frankly, I don't think I will finish it. It's all over the place, the overdone descriptions of each situation make me want to skip through large parts of the book. It's just not a book I look forward to picking up again. I'm reading it for a book club, and every other person in the club feels exactly the same way. I wouldn't waste your money on this one.
6 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 18, 2011
I don't know what kind of society people think we live in but expecting everything to be cheap/free is absurd as well as counter productive. If people want free books take a few minutes out of your busy days of whining to learn how to illegally download them, in the mean time I will spend every penny on a book as artistically crafted as Swamplandia and hope some of it trickles down to the author.
6 out of 11 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 4, 2011
It has been a vey long time since a book has intoxicated me as much as this one. Karen Russel's brilliant prose breathes to life unforgettable characters and reclaims the beauty of a forgotten geography. She gives the well worn theme of childhood lost a new perspective and keeps you turning pages until you are sorry there are none left.
5 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.babsbabsbabs
Posted June 22, 2011
This one falls apart about three chapters into the swamp. By the end I was rooting for the alligators. Too much story spread out over too many characters and a lack of development to care about any one of them or their plight. By the end, I just didn't care.
4 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
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Posted December 3, 2011
Taken in by the cover, I was intrigued enough to read a few lines. I was hooked from the beginning. Russel's prose are of such moving quality that I found myself riveted. Innocent and dark, insightful and all-too-relatable; I ached for Russel's characters. A truly brilliant new author. A must read for those who wander from the beaten path and enjoy the extraordinary.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 17, 2012
I was so gratified to see the number of people who did NOT like this book. I didn't either, and I wondered what was wrong with me, considering all the rave reviews it has gotten from professional critics. I was bored, frankly, and quit after about fifty pages. I was expecting something on the order of Carl Hiaasen, one of my favorite writers, and it wasn't, so that was my fault.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I think Karen Russel is an excellent author with great writing skill. The characters in this book are intriguing, the whole venture suffers by a weak and meandering plot. I'd be interested to read another Karen Russel novel but this one just barely makes it out of the swamp.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 29, 2012
I think I'm being kind when I give this book three stars. It's not that the writing was bad, because honestly, it wasn't. It wasn't that the characters were awful, because they weren't. Mainly it's because about half way through this book all of the characters take a nose dive towards disaster and are basically ruined by life. From the start you know that life won't be easy for them but you continue to read it because the characters are loveable and have such great souls. By the end, the world is pretty much a confirmed poophole from which no one gets out alive.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted December 25, 2011
When you're reading Swamplandia! you know you're in the hands of a writer who can make you gasp at her ability to use language, who knows more strange and interesting stuff than just about anyone you've met, and who has a boundless imagination. The trouble is she doesn't always know what to do with all these gifts and the reader doesn't always know what to make of the book. I didn't have any difficulty making the journey (the journeys) just for the sheer pleasure of Ava's and Kiwi's company. But like her characters I did sometimes feel lost along the way. And, at the end, looking back, I don't know what to make of the trip. I do have the feeling that there were a couple of places in the book where Russell made some wrong turns and got pulled into the vortex of her own brilliance. But to be sure, I will read her next.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted April 4, 2011
From the moment I read the synopsis of Swamplandia by Karen Russell, I knew I had to read it. Once I began reading, I could not help but think that the audience might include fans of Geek Love. I was not surprised to see that in her acknowledgments, Russell lists Geek Love author Katherine Dunn as an influence. No surprise, Geek Love is a favorite of mine. Swamplandia! is not a light-hearted tale. There are definitely things wrong in the Bigtree family after matriarch Hilola Bigtree's death. Hilola, the alligator wrestler, is the main attraction for Swamplandia! The family is unable to continue enticing tourists to their swampy island without Hilola. I don't want to spoil anything for potential readers, but very worrisome events occur after the tourists stop arriving. The book seemed somewhat slow-going at first, but the descriptions were vivid enough to keep me reading. It was all worth it. Swamplandia! is a new favorite for me. Many readers seem to have arrived at reading this book after enjoying Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. I am in the opposite camp. After reading Swamplandia!, I cannot wait to get my hands on her short story collection.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 7, 2011
This book is overly descriptive detailed in areas of no concern, and completely under descriptive detailed in areas that should be. It totally loses your interest with the different tangents it takes constantly, in fact towards the end when you are adept at skipping large sections of descriptive text, you almost miss the two sentences that have a huge impact on the story...it's a disappointing read. Everyone in our book club felt the same way, which left us wondering why our thoughts were so different from all the other reviews...
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted June 6, 2012
I kept reading and reading waiting for the plot to draw me in. Never happened. Sad characters and an anticlimatic predictable ending.
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted June 6, 2012
It takes a while to really get into the main plot of the story and the vocabulary is a little dense...especially if you know nothing about alligators or swamps...but overall a really interesting book. Not a typical coming of age story.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted April 28, 2012
Given the harry potter and vampire success enjoyed recently, I would expect to see this book wildly popular.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted April 28, 2012
The fact that Karen Russel managed to produce such a honed gem of a book in her 20s (!) Is nearly uncanny. This book had so many shining facets to keep this reader in it's thrall- Eccentric outsiders,.characters so well-drawn that empathy is effortless, family ties, love, grief, wry humor, southern gothic ghost stories, history & science, heady atmospheres, teen angst & hardwon wisdom, trauma, adventure...and all shot through with bang-on metaphors, beautiful similies, descriptive vistas of aching beauty.
Yes indeed, an awesome book and one of the finest credits to Florida lit. since Marjorie Keenan Rawlins' 'Cross Creek'.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Things are not going well in Swamplandia! Once a major tourist draw with hordes of visitors each day, the death of the show's main attraction has put a serious dent in the business. Even worse, the main attraction was also the mother of the Bigtree family that runs Swamplandia.
Karen Russell's novel is the story of how this family comes to grip with the loss of their mother and the possible ending of the only life they have known; that of the Bigtree family of Swamplandia!. There are three children. Ossie, the oldest sister who is sixteen, has never been that involved with the business, being a fey girl who drifts through life. She becomes entranced with spiritualism and soon convinces herself that she can talk to the dead and that dead boys are perfect boyfriends. Kiwi, the oldest and only son, has always wanted a 'normal' life on the mainland, and leaves the Swamplandia! island, determined to make it on his own and then figure out how to save the park. Ava Bigtree is thirteen and the novel's protagonist. She loves the business and her only dream is to grow up and take over for her mother.
Chief Bigtree, the father, is one of those optimistic people who is sure everything will work out even when he has no plan to make it happen. He leaves on a mysterious business trip shortly after Kiwi's departure, leaving the girls alone on the island. Ossie disappears into the swamp, chasing her ghostly love, and Ava soon goes into the swamp to rescue her. Will this family ever be reunited and made whole?
Readers will love the fresh voice and writing style of Karen Russell. Ava's spirit is so big it jumps off the page, and the ability to experience life from her young perspective is intriguing. The characters are memorable, and the reader gets to experience the Florida swamps in all their murky, humid, bug-infested, dangerous appeal. This book is recommended for all readers, and especially those interested in coming of age stories and those of families finding their way to make a live together.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.mewant
Posted April 18, 2012
gothic metaphors. in touch with current culture. ironic. told so carefully, always almost funny then not. pain expressed with out excess juxtaposed to another kind excess told through seriously innocent eyes. feminine child perspective perfectly expressed. an engaging story, never read anything similar. kids wanting to save crumbling family. and they do. probably helps i was a disneyland kid:) wanting to save my family. IMO, this is art. best book i have read in years.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I am a lifelong reader and while there are less than a handful of books I have started and were unable to complete this is certainly one of them. If enjoyment or enlightenment figures into the many reasons why you read books I would be wary of the glowing professional reviews touting this book. I am fifty pages into the book bored silly and am asking myself what am I missing. My best advice is caveat emptor.
1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Overview
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a ...