Swamplandia!

Swamplandia was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2012. I started reading this book several times since then and finally finished it. It is difficult to sum it up without mentioning all the allusions to and metaphors for hell. Russell describes the swamps of Florida as the underworld.

The book's fictional competing theme parks are Swamplandia and World of Darkness. The customers at World of Darkness are called Lost Souls, and the Swamplandia owners' dream is to create Carnival Darwinism. I wondered whether Russell was intimating that Florida is hell or that the white settlers created hell with their flagrant disregard for environmental safeguards. Besides making satiric comments about the haphazard development of Florida lands, she lampoons the concept of homeschooling by creating three homeschooled teenagers who are clueless about the ways of the world, away from their swamp home.

The featured family, led by Grandpa Sawtooth, is a quintessential failed coal miner who came to Florida to reinvent himself. Grandpa, a white man, takes on the persona of a fake Native American and calls his family Bigtree. His son, Chief Bigtree, and Hilola are the parents of three children: Ava, Osceola, and Kiwi. They own and operate a theme park called Swamplandia, where the main attraction is alligator wrestling; the mother, Hilola, is the show's star.

Ava Bigtree, the youngest of the three Bighorn children, is the storyteller. Ava is thirteen at the start of the tale, and she and her siblings are devastated when their mother dies of cancer. They are grieving for their mother, and the family business is also virtually defunct without the mother's nightly alligator show. Each Bigtree child experiences darkness in their efforts to cope, and each manifests grief in unusual ways, leading to a fascinating and unusual story. Osceola begins dating ghosts, and Kiwi leaves the island for the mainland and tries to support himself and his family by working at World of Darkness. Ava nurtures a pet alligator and remains in the dysfunctional family's home even after her father goes to the mainland to work. Her siblings provide little physical or emotional support.

Using magical realism and extraordinary imagination, Russell includes multiple concepts and themes in this family and Floridian tale. Serious issues are addressed ludicrously, forcing the reader to consider the preposterous as well as reality. For instance, the environmental destruction of Florida is highlighted throughout the book from different perspectives. Swamp living, poverty, education, and tourists figure prominently in Russell's narrative. There is also a focus on mental health, assault, and lots of hellish, dark topics as three youngsters come of age.

What in tarnation

If you think this book is going to be magical and fun based on the description... IT'S NOT. It's NOT a cool swamp adventure and I have a lot of thoughts.

The Bigtree family runs an alligator wrestling theme park in Florida. Unfortunately the mother dies who was the big star and so all the tourists stop showing up and things aren't looking good for the future of the park. This is where the story starts

There are three kids in this family: Kiwi (17), Ossie (16), and Ava (12/13?). There's also their dad who they call "Chief". Soon after their mother's death Ossie finds a book about ghosts and magic and she thinks she can communicate with the dead. Meanwhile, Kiwi is worried about their future and suspects they're running out of money. It seems like their father isn't worried or doing enough to save the family, so Kiwi leaves to get a job and try to go to school and send back money. He gets a job at a "real" theme park and half the book is about his job there. Soon afterwards, their dad also leaves to go earn some more money, leaving Ossie and Ava alone (which is SO STUPID, but I digress).

Soon after their dad and brother leave, Ossie "meets" a ghost named Louis Thanksgiving and decides she's going to run away into the swamp and marry him. Ava is concerned about this obviously and decides to go after her (along with some random man who she meets lurking outside her house and who's name she doesn't know). All of this is basically on the back of the book, except some of the specific details.

Almost halfway through the book I started to get an unsettling feeling. It was interesting so far, but I was getting worried and decided to look up reviews with spoilers and learned that the Birdman rapes Ava in the swamp and immediately didn't want to read anymore. Eventually I decided I would keep reading because I was already extremely upset knowing that that's what happened I figured it wouldn't make it any worse if I just finished the goddamn book. It does happen and it happens right towards the end and it sucks. Technically I guess you could say that things "work out okay" in the end, but I feel like this book just wanted me to feel terrible. The whole time I felt like it was just screaming at me "you think life is fun and magical??? haha NO! life is actually awful and disgusting and horrible and nothing means anything and there's no magic and also fuck you".

In the end they go to a "normal" life at a normal school, Ossie is on medications, and they just get an apartment and that's it.. no more alligators or theme park or anything. The entire book you hear about how cool and magical the theme park was before, but you never get to see that. Even when the characters mention it to other people in the story, very rarely has anybody ever heard of Swamplandia. Ava's (and Ossie's) horrible experience in the swamp are never really dealt with in any real way. Ava describes her nightmares and Ossie's medications and how she learns to conform. All of Kiwi's chapters are about his desires to go to school and his struggles to conform to expectations after growing up the way he did... It's so depressing.

I feel like emotionally I understand what this book was going for. It's bleak and harsh and awful. I think that's what it was going for. It reminded me of Goosebumps or Gravity Falls or something but if you sucked all the fun out with a siphon. It feels gross. There's one scene where Kiwi finds out that his dad has been secretly working at a casino. Instead of seeing his father as this great theatrical presence, he's sort of just old and pitiful. That's kind of what reading this book is like. These characters are each realizing slowly that the magic they saw in the world was never actually there. It actually all sucks, and I'm just like.... why would anybody want to read this? After reading this I just feel drained and sad. If you want a book that makes you feel like nothing matters and everything sucks, I guess this could work for you, but in general I definitely wouldn't recommend it. I'm not saying all books have to be fun, but man... this was bleak.

Back in my totally middle class 70's childhood, my family used to go camping down in Florida and in various other places where strange roadside attractions loomed. I always wondered about the families that ran those reptile zoos or collections of plaster dinosaurs or bizarre ersatz "Native American" teepee huts. My dad was always too cheap to take us to any of the really good attractions, like Disney world or 6 Flags or anything like that, so our days were spent in places where a disenchanted alligator would yawn at us and we would look, frantically, in the gifte shoppes in the hope of finding something to make our visits worthwhile. Of course, my dad would never buy us anything that we asked for, so most of the time was spent in trying to indicate wants without actually saying them, but that's another story.
Swamplandia is a totally perfect rendition of what I always imagined those families to be like. I wallowed in this book. I felt the mosquitoes, the heat, the despair of living on not enough money and trying to be a star. I could see the curling-up posters on the wall, the postcards that were printed slightly off so the red poked out from behind the picture a bit.
It's not a really cheerful book. Things go bad and then things get worse and so on, but the characters seem to just take most of it in stride and succeed in their own way, nonetheless. One doesn't get the same emotional drenching as one would, say, in a Joy Fielding novel about the same situation. The floating along-ness goes with the pace of the book. Emotions aren't plumbed to their very depths - when something really bad happens, it's just described, and we move on. It's not less horrible for that - it instead speaks to the expectations of this family. They survive because they don't hope for better. As Mary Engelbreit's brightly cheerful poster says, "Life is just so daily!" And yet. Despite their calmness, I found myself rooting for the whole family throughout the book, wishing them well. Heck, I'd go to Swamplandia myself, just to see the swimming act...

A novel I wasn't sure I'd like, but I did.

Another book I did not think I would like and definitely did not! And so much offensive about it including its definition and background of mental illness. I lost my place, had no idea where I was, and skimmed much of it, but still very displeased.

This novel is about a family of alligator wrestlers living in the Florida swampland, but I feel like neither that nor anything else I could possibly think to say about it adequately describes it. It's absurd, touching, sometimes dreamlike, very disturbing in places, and deeply weird. I can say that I'm rather impressed with Russell's writing. She has a way of coming up with metaphors and descriptions that are sometimes bizarre and off-kilter but somehow work for this particular story and other times are just incredibly apt and beautiful.

Ultimately, it's as hard to know quite what to make of Swamplandia! as it is to describe it, but I can definitely say this much about it: at a time when I find myself increasingly distracted and often unable to settle into a book for as long as I'd like, this one grabbed me by the brain and left me wanting to do nothing else but read. And, boy, was it good to sink into that experience again.

Rating: 4.5/5. I could argue with myself about whether it deserves the extra half-star, and maybe if I'd read it at a different time I'd be less generous, but I think that last point pretty well clinches it for me right now.

The title refers to the island park in Florida's Everglades, where the Bigtree family makes a living wrestling alligators. But the untimely death of the park's star, Hilola Bigtree, wife to the Chief, mother to 13-year old Ava and her two older siblings, sends the family into a tailspin. The tourists stop coming, the Chief withdraws, leaving Ava, her sister Ossie, and their brother Kiwi to fend for themselves. But Kiwi heads to the mainland to work for their competitor, the Chief heads out on a business trip, and Ossie is dating a supposed ghost, leaving Ava to try to save Swamplandia! and her family.

The book skirts the surreal and after what seemed to me to be a slow start, it became a compelling read about grief, loss of innocence, endings, and beginnings. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, but I don't think I'll ever forget Ava and her family.

That said, this is also a flawed book. I'm a forgiving reader, so once I really got into it, halfway through, I stopped noticing the small bits that seemed off, the sorts of things that bother some readers and not others. It's an odd book in many ways, one I ultimately liked but also one that could have been much better.

Adult fiction.

Gator Wonderland:
Three kids cope with park's demise.
Swallowed by Darkness?

A charming, compelling, and sadly tender coming-of-age story. It was much darker than I wanted or expected given the goofiness of the setting and characters, or the exclamation point in the title.

Novel words:
cocoplum: a tropical plant with an edible but nearly tasteless plum-like fruit
gastrolith: a small stone swallowed by a bird, reptile, or fish, to aid digestion in the gizzard
gharial: a very rare crocodile from the Indian subcontinent with a long thin snout. It is the longest extant crocodilian, growing up to 20 feet long.
lachrymose: tearful, weepy
melaleuca: a genus of myrtle tree with 300 species in it
otolith: tiny sac that connects an alligator's inner ear to its brain

Ava Bigtree lives in Swamplandia! with her family. They wrestle alligators in front of tourists for a living. Until recently Ava’s mother Hillola was the star of the show, her moonlight swim through the gator pond was always a hit with the audience. But then she got sick, and died. And Grandpa Sawtooth has been taken to the old folk’s home. Tourist numbers are down, and things are only getting worse. Chief Bigtree, Ava’s father, goes off to the mainland on a business trip looking for investors, and Ava’s older brother Kiwi has abandoned the swamp, taking a job with the arch-enemy, The World of Darkness, a more modern and lucrative amusement park. And now Ava’s sister is dating ghosts.

SwamplandiaI soooo wanted to like this book. I’d heard so many good things about her collection of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and about Russell’s writing that I thought this would be a book that would suit me. And the blurb promised a dark and mythic story. Plus, you know, alligators and swaps.

But I found that while some aspects of this book really did work, it just didn’t pull together as a whole. There were hints of atmosphere, but the plot just meandered on and around and over here, and then back again. It never held my attention despite some of the scenes, such as the story of Louis Thanksgiving, that I thought was very well done.

And as a whole it was predictable. And bits of it seemed dark just to be dark, they didn’t add to the story, or to the characters. And in many ways the style of the book echoed that unsatisfying experience. While in some places I did really enjoy her way of describing a person, or a scene, for the most part I was bored. I was tempted to stop, but Ava & Kiwi’s stories gripped me just enough that I had sufficient interest to finish the book.

Karen Russell filters sunlight and nostalgia onto the page. This was the first book in a long time that would not wrestle itself from my hands. The characters and the story got into my brain and splashed around in there, happily displacing the muck of my everyday life.
In the acknowledgments, Karen Russell thanks George Saunders, Katherine Dunn and Kelly Link for their inspiration. Oh how I wish that I could see the supposed genius in Kelly Link's writing like I do in Karen's.

I loved the idea of this novel, so much. Which is why I was thoroughly excited when my local library finally got a copy of the audiobook, narrated by a young sounding teen girl (mostly). The story is strange, the title is awesome, and the setting and characters are completely foreign to me ... What with the alligators, swamps, ghosts, a bird man, and Florida and all. But did I have fun, throughout the novel? Did I enjoy it as much as I thought I would....?

Unfortunately, not so much... Russell is clearly a talented writer with a cutting sense of humor (of which she shows a few hints in the beginning), but this story is one that I'd love to have changed direction, or something. I incorrectly interpreted the strangeness of this book to be something mystical and otherworldly, like Alice in Wonderland, only in Florida. At first, like our heroine Ava, I was inspired to believe that interesting things -things that defy the laws of the universe- were afoot. But then, also like Ava and the rest of her family, I was cruelly stomped on by the real world. For poor Ava, this doesn't even begin to cover it. What the utter hell was Russell thinking....? Ugh, I utterly HATE it when things like this happen to young characters like Ava.

By the end, Russell makes it clear that there is no magic or wonder to be found here, only horribleness. This is not a swampier Alice in Wonderland ... more like a swampier version of a Stephen King novel crossed with a police blotter. There is a LOT in this book is dark and ugly. At first this seems interesting and edgy, but there's no payoff. Some storylines were just left to lie rotting in the swamp, never to be heard from again. And While the teens in this novel were quirky and interesting, while talking like they were throwing up parts of their musty thesaurus, i still didn't get WHY they all had to do what they did. This didn't seem cleared up enough, for me.

And for me, this story doesn't accomplish anything other than make sure the reader is more despondent about the world by the final page. That, and perhaps convincing many to never visit Florida. The thought of the mosquitoes alone is enough to make anyone stay home, in the comfort of their air conditioned flat. Hopefully, Russell tries harder with her later novels, to keep the storyline, and the characters from meandering all through the swamps of Florida....... and maybe not making me wish I lived in Alaska. I don't think I could handle another story like this. Believe me, I don't need all my stories or novels all wrapped up in a Happily Ever After bow, etc, etc. But this story really rubbed me the wrong way I guess. And having a young, fragile sounding teen girl read the narration? Yuck. I have to go read some comics or something, now. 3 stars.

I had heard good things about this book and finally got to it on audio. While I liked the premise and the course of the story, the narrator completely ruined it for me. I understand the main character is a young girl but this narrator verged on unprofessional, mispronouncing words and flat delivery. Some of the chapters were 'narrated' by her older brother but he was not much better. His inflection was better but still mispronounced words. I guess if you're going to tackle this one do it in print.

The only world that Ava Bigtree has ever known is that of Swamplandia!, her family's island home in the Florida Everglades that also doubles as an alligator theme park. The star of their show is Ava's mother and when her mom dies, the park, and Ava's family, falls apart. Ava's father goes to the mainland to find some investors, her brother leaves home and joins a rival theme park and her sister runs off with her ghost boyfriend. Ava finds herself on a mission through the swamp to save her family.

This is the first time I've come across Karen Russell and it's my understanding that this novel is an expansion on one of her previous short stories. I was completely surprised by how much I liked this book. I found Ava and Ms. Russell's writing engaging. Ms. Russell has a commanding use of vocabulary and language. More than once I thought "now that's a $10 word." The story is unique and fun. There were parts of it I didn't like and some things that I thought could have been better explained but overall a very enjoyable read. I'm thinking about looking up some of her short stories and checking those out.

"The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn't see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle and an ending. . . . I didn't realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another - bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bates out of a cave." (pg. 8-9)

Amazing writing: loved the tone of the narrator, particularly Ava. The storyline did get rather grim toward the end, and the ending itself was somewhat abrupt, but that is the risk of storytelling in a life, even a fictional one: there are few good places to end it that feel completely resolved. The rest of the book was so exceptional that I can happily give a pass on the end.

I wanted to read this book ever since I first heard about it. I love stories set in the swamps, and a family that runs an alligator wrestling theme park. That alone is fascinating to me. I would have liked to see more of the day to day operations of the park. Unfortunately, tragedy strikes and the future of the park is in trouble. As the characters begin to leave the park, the narrative becomes fragmented.

The three children, Kiwi, Osceola and Ava, all come across as extremely naive. Almost painfully so. Kiwi tries to "man up" and gets a job on the mainland at a rival theme park. Osceola and Ava then make extremely bad decisions which end in both of them heading into the swamp.

I felt like the book was the strongest when describing the two theme parks. The imagery of the swamp was beautiful. I just wish the girls hadn't made such stupid decisions.

In the quirky world of Swamplandia, a waterlogged island on Florida’s southwest coast, even the alligators are part of the act. Chief Bigtree is not actually a native, but he still thinks of his family as a tribe. And the family business is alligator wrestling. And everyone in the family is part of the business. But when the Chief’s wife, Hilola, succumbs to cancer, the real world starts seeping in. Soon the Chief’s father, “Sawtooth”, has to be put in a home for the elderly. And then a massive and nasty competitor, The World of Darkness, opens on the mainland. Which quickly puts an end to the tourists making their way across the water to Swamplandia. The Chief has a crazy plan to meet this new challenge, but his three children know it is doomed. When he leaves to “talk to investors” and fails to return, first his son, Kiwi, leaves to find actual employment at, surprise, The World of Darkness, and then his oldest, Osceola, follows her ghost boyfriend into the swamps, leaving young Ava to hold the fort. But eventually Ava is compelled to put forth in search of her sister, even if she has to journey to underworld to find her.

Of course what starts out quirky and fun often hides darker matters. Some of these come to the fore in Kiwi’s steep learning curve amongst his co-workers at The World of Darkness. But even more are visited upon Ava, some so shockingly as to be altogether out of keeping with the tone of the remainder of the novel. I suppose it is a risk whenever characters and events are unmoored or ungrounded. Anything can happen. And there are plenty of bad things that are just as likely to happen as good things.

There is much here in the writing that is admirable. And certainly the imaginative initial concept of the Swamplandia alligator theme park is beguiling. But just as Ava and her travelling companion risk getting lost in the channels of the swamp, so too does this story. So while there are moments and scenes that are delightful, the whole is less, perhaps, than the sum of (at least) some of its parts. However, Russell is clearly an author to keep an eye on, even if, for me, this novel didn’t entirely work.

Being from the North American "south" and having lived in Florida on a swamp. It all makes senses, i. e. it makes no sense. It's strange, different.

charming and lovely and deeply deeply sad. loved every minute of it

This novel is about grief. It's about families, growing up outside of society, but most of all grief, especially the grief of children and a father who can't hold it together. As adults we forget exactly how nebulous and bizarre the world is to children and it was disconcerting to feel it so heavily. Are they weird children? Of course, look at their parents and how they are growing up. But the pain is real and I didn't think the ending was rushed or sloppy. Each child traveled a path through unbearable turmoil as they came to grips with their mother's death and traveled through their own individual hell to get through.

One of the reasons this book was good was the voice-acting. I'm not sure whether I would have liked it as much to read it. In the children's voices it sounds real and you remember being young and being completely naive, especially growing up the way these children did.

It is a slow read but the descriptions are surreal and beautiful and descriptive in a way that's unnerving. The plot twist everyone seems to be surprised kept me with a pit in my stomach from the moment the foreshadowing began. I'm honestly not sure how anyone was surprised by it because the dread leading up to it was terrifying and absolute.

Wow this was a depressing book. Which is not to say I didn't like it... I felt it mapped the ways a family can twist away from each other in such different convoluted directions, each individual having to dredge through their own personal swamp/ hell. The grieving process is a monster!

Ava is phenomenal. She is an adorable character who has her own strength and is easy to understand. It is possible that the whole book is saved thanks to her; thanks to her adventures, to her dreams, to the idea of returning everything to how it was before her mother died.

Karen Russell knows very well how to explain the world in which she lives. The swamps, the alligators, the humidity. Hilola Bigtree does not seem to have died; she seems to be reborn in her daughter, and reading her is to enter into both parts.

The rest of the characters are interesting but do not become memorable (maybe Ossie, with her white, very white skin, and her taste for the extraterrestrial).

The ending, on the other hand, is pleasant but leaves your heart filled with gravel. (Translated from Spanish)

This is one of those highly unusual books that you know is going to be highly unusual from the beginning, but when the oddball stuff starts to hit you, it seems to be a total surprise. I knew the girl's sister was going to be dating a ghost, it said so in the book description, but then it happened and I blinked and got used to everything all over again. That isn't to say that this was the kind of book that jarred me out of it's realm, because it pulled me in so deeply that I almost felt the swamp around me while I listened.

A book like this isn't going to be for everyone. I picked it up because it was longlisted for the Women's Prize for fiction, but it has earned more praise than that and certainly deserves it. I wouldn't have found this book if it weren't for my wanting to read through the longlist. It was a treasure chest of unusual plot, good storytelling, and just enough humor. I'm glad I stumbled on it.

Really weird and the ending is disturbing. The main character has a weird encounter with a fisherman while trying to find her sister who has been possessed by a ghost and it is implied that the fisherman "takes advantage" of the girl.

This would have been a five star read for me if it weren't for the disappointing turn in the story line 2/3 of the way through the book. Otherwise the unique setting, characters and story combined with Russel's creative prose had me hooked for most of the book.

This book hit all my hot buttons. Great characters, unusual plot, masterful writing, ironic humor. It's a little like Water for Elephants in that it leans slightly into a fantasy world without tipping over into the fantasy genre. I listened to it, and though it took me a while to appreciate the actor who read Ava's parts (a male actor read Kiwi's) I grew to love her. Some books I suspect are better on paper, other in audio form. In this case I think both would be wonderful. The only off note for me was an event towards the end of the book. I don't want to spoil things so I won't go into detail except to say that it wasn't dealt with in a way that felt consistent with the rest of the book. Other than that I was entranced.

The book started strong with an intriguing premise and lyrical writing, and then it just fizzled aimlessly like a catfish on land wriggling left and right going nowhere fast with an unsatisfying and abrupt ending to match.

The Bigtree family runs the Swamplandia! alligator wrestling theme park that went downhill following the mom’s death from cancer. Grandpa has dementia and is sent to a mainland home. Kiwi, 17, leaves to make money working at the rival theme park. Dad’s struggle to keep the park afloat goes awry quickly, and he disappears except to ensure supplies are delivered to the park for the kids. Ava, 13, and older Osceola are left to fend for themselves. The latter is convinced she loves a ghost and leaves to marry him in the underworld. Ava befriends “The Bird Man” who helps her look for Osceola in the swamp, but it all ends badly.

The book is in a unique setting amongst the Florida Everglades near the Gulf. Ava’s narratives address island life vs. mainland and the social injustices in the region, particularly against the Seminole Native Americans. After Kiwi’s departure, the chapters alternated between Ava’s first person narrative that navigated the mystical and the swamp vs. Kiwi’s third person narrative is amongst the realists. As an indecisive 13 year old, Ava is both exceptionally wise and clueless beyond words. Kiwi‘s life in mainland is filled with every pain of having to grow up quickly. The mystical parts, as much as I want to embrace it, were eventually lost on me, just too, too much. It is possible that I am simply angry at what happened with Ava, and that it is further dismissed including her own thought of maybe she really wanted it. I just about blew a lid at that moment wanting to shred the book to bits.

A generous 3 stars rating because unfortunately, I will remember this book.

Quotes:

On lies:
“The asterisk, the Chief taught us, was the special punctuation that God gave us for neutralizing lies. One recent example would be ‘Your mother’s cancer is getting better.*’”

On old age:
“Now as a punishment for his forgetfulness Grandpa had to live at the Out to Sea Retirement Community, in a peeling umber cabin, on this refurbished and possibly haunted houseboat that he shared with a bunch of pissed septuagenarians. Grandpa’s bunkmate, Harold Clink, was ninety-two years old and almost entirely deaf and yet he would talk to you only in song, songs without rhythms, songs that he made up; we Bigtrees had all worried (some of us hoped!) that Grandpa would kill this person in the night. The houseboat was retired, too, at permanent anchor in the marina. The seniors got issued these pastel pajamas that made them look like Easter eggs in wheelchairs. If you went to visit, that’s what you saw: Easter eggs in these adult cribs, Easter eggs on toilets with guardrails. Black curtains closed the portholes.”

On growing up and catching up:
Ch 6: “When he’d used the word ‘pulchritude’ – a compliment! he insisted – in unwitting reference to another janitor’s girlfriend; he later found condoms full of pudding in his work locker and a new phrase to dissect in his Field notes, GAYASS ASSFUCKER, etched with a cafeteria knife above the locker gills. When he recited ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ hoping to impress Nina Suarez, who was wiping cigarette butts out of the whale ashtrays with a rag, Ephraim Lipmann happened to overhear him and told everybody on the Leviathan crew that Margaret Mead was definitely gay.”

Ch 20: “Kiwi thought back to his first weeks, when insults had been impossible for him. One time he’d called Deemer a troglodyte but his delivery had been tentative and way, way too slow, as if the insult were a fork tenderly entering a steak. Now he could tell any man in the World to go fuck himself with a baseball bat. Progress was being made, he guessed.”

On sex and the first time:
“Emily giggled at something bland and declarative he said, kissed the tip of his nose – sort of fell there, actually. Her head crashed into Kiwi’s shoulder. He could smell and taste that she was very drunk.
How strange, Kiwi thought, that you could want so badly to insert a part of your anatomy inside someone who you hated. Kiwi had never once seen a pornographic film. Henry Miller’s books had aroused but confused him. At some midnightish time he put a hand on Emily’s forehead – smack on it, like a TV athlete palming a basketball or a shaman attempting an exorcism – and tried to kiss her. Did he miss? His lips grazed a left eyebrow. The attempt was not repeated.”

I really did not like this book. I had to push myself to get to the end. (fyi - #4 is a bit of a spoiler.)

The good. The writer has a gift for lyricism.

The bad.

1. A lot of tired tropes. Magic realism (I think). Suburbia is bad. Late capitalism is bad. The average joe is an idiot. Quirky settings for the sake of quirky settings. Stories within stories.

2. Thin plotting coupled with outlandish plotting.

3. But even worse than that is the bad story telling. The author would describe the action and then not know what to do next so she would insert some lyrical passage. A lot of this was annoying, over-the-top description, but there were big chunks of stuff that had nothing to do with anything. We have a little excitement going when Ava tries to escape and then we get this story about Mama Weeds. WTF.

4. The weird business with the birdman. The figure is romanticized, mythologized and then turned into very realistic abuser. It's almost like the birdman gets a pass because he's not real half the time and its not clear what happens to him in the end - if anything. And what is up with Walt? Is he complicit in the business? There was nothing good about this part of the storyline. The whole business was creepy in a bad way.

5. The New York Times listed this as one of the top 5 fiction books of 2011. Inexplicable.

Swamplandia! was a well received 2011 novel whose author was hailed by the New Yorker and the NYT. Swamplandia!, with the exclamation mark, is the name given to the Everglades amusement park where the Bigtree family specializes in alligator wrestling. The star of the show, Hilola, the statuesque mother of our three main characters, dies of cancer early in the novel; with her loss, the park no longer attracts the crowd that used to barely sustain this dysfunctional family. Ava, the 13 year old narrator notes,
"I started to miss the same tourists I’d always claimed to despise: the translucent seniors from Michigan. The ice-blond foreign couples yoked into thick black camera straps like teams of oxen. The fathers, sweating everywhere, with their trembling dew mustaches. The young mothers humping up and down the elevated walkway to the Swamp Café, holding their babies aloft like blaring radios."
When their father goes off to the mainland to try and drum up business, and Kiwi, the 16 year old also leaves to work in a competing amusement park, Ava and her older, seance-loving sister, Osceola, are left to take care of themselves. Not long after, Ava finds herself having to go out searching for her delusional sister who has run off to marry a spirit named Louis Thanksgiving. Her poor choice of a guide, a unscrupulous character called Birdman, provides all the portent needed for a journey to the underworld.
I enjoyed the quirkiness of the characters and the wonderful description of this most unusual setting. It's impressive how this novel evolved from a short story written when the author was only 24 years old. I'm sure that Ms. Russell will continue make her mark.
Some writing samples:
As a kid I heard the word malignancy as “Malig-Nancy,” like an evil woman’s name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first symptoms for a pregnancy, and so I still pictured the Malig-Nancy as a baby, a tiny, eyeless fist of a sister, killing her.

"In the old days, good smells filled the kitchen (misleading smells, since our mom’s cooking strategy was to throw a couple of raw things into a greased pan and wait to see what happened, like watching strangers on a date)."