Swamplandia! - Rambling Readers

Hardcover, 316 pages

English language

Published 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf.

ISBN:: 978-0-307-26399-5
OCLC Number:: 613432205

No rating (1 review)

The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline. And Swamplandia!, the family's island home and theme park, in the Florida Everglades, has sophisticated competition - The World of Darkness. Ava is a resourceful, but terrified twelve-year-old, who must manage seventy gators, and the vast landscape of her grief. Her mother, Swamplandia!'s star attraction, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her Grandpa has been sent to an old folk's home; her brother has defected to The World of Darkness to keep the family afloat; and her father is AWOL. To save them, Ava must journey on her own to a perilous part of the swamp called the Underworld, a harrowing odyssey from which she emerges a true heroine.

4 editions

Leaf 🍂 reviewed Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Review of 'Swamplandia!' on 'Storygraph'

No rating

I'm having trouble deciding how I felt about this. The prose was brilliant, the characters and creatures and colors all very vivid and intense. I guess what bothered me was that, in the end, it clung to being a literary novel rather than the magical realism I'd hoped for.
The main failing in literary novels, to me, is that they must contain a Deep Important Concept, which always seems to come to the same thing: things get worse before they get better, being human is suffering. Lots of suffering, all the characters hit their low point at the same time and nothing ever gets terribly much better. Nobody discusses or processes anything. Things just happen.
It was good in many ways, and perhaps I'll like it better once I've done more processing of my own. Going to hold off rating it for a bit.