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Swamplandia!
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Swamplandia!
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Swamplandia!
Audiobook13 hours

Swamplandia!

Written by Karen Russell

Narrated by Arielle Sitrick and David Ackroyd

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

From the celebrated twenty-nine-year-old author of the everywhere-heralded short-story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves ("How I wish these were my own words, instead of the breakneck demon writer Karen Russell's . . . Run for your life. This girl is on fire"-Los Angeles Times Book Review) comes a blazingly original debut novel that takes us back to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine.

The Bigtree alligator-wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, formerly #1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava's father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety-eight gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief.

Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work from a vibrant new voice in fiction.


From the Hardcover edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 1, 2011
ISBN9780307748881
Unavailable
Swamplandia!

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Reviews for Swamplandia!

Rating: 3.3531811641109295 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    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.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This was one of those books that was on my "to read" list forever. Thrilled to pick it up at a library book sale.So disappointed. I'm sure the characters are supposed to be endearingly quirky - I found that I didn't care about any of them.I stopped reading around the time that the young girl, Ava, went off with a complete stranger (adult male) who told her he would help her find her missing sister. Um, no thanks.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    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.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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.

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    charming and lovely and deeply deeply sad. loved every minute of it
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Swamplandia! is a family-owned alligator theme park in the Florida Everglades. The struggle to keep it running comes to a grinding halt when the star performer dies and there is no longer a show to go on. The star, Hilola Bigtree, was also wife to the Chief and mother to Kiwi, Osceola, and Ava and without her to hold them together, the family starts to fall apart. The Chief goes off to find some “investors” and son, Kiwi, leaves for the mainland and finds work at the wonderfully satirical competition known as the World of Darkness. Young Ava goes off in search of her sister, who has left home to elope with her literal ghost of a boyfriend.I loved this book and was easily sucked into caring for the fabulously appealing characters. It was a wonderfully told coming of age story with a great gothic feel, lots of humor at “The World”, and a bit of true darkness. There was also the bonus telling of the history of the damage man has wrought in the Everglades. Quirky, with a great cover, and well deserving of the exclamation point in the title(!). 4.25 stars – points off for an overlong swamp journey with an unlikely Bird Man.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I was *so* looking forward to this book. The writing is awesome, and I sincerely admire Russell's command of the English language.

    But. I was deeply frustrated, even pained, by this book. I really liked two of the three main characters, and rooted for them, but there were long stretches where I grew impatient with the storyline. One character's particular journey is described in elaborate detail -- it's probably at least a quarter of the book -- but the building of suspense seemed to go too long. By the time I finally started to suspect that something was about to happen, it was with a feeling of dread that it was going to be something I really didn't want to happen... and so of course that's exactly how it went. In all fairness it was a decent twist to the story: just enough foreshadowing that in retrospect it seemed unavoidable, but subtle enough that it still caught me mostly by surprise. Still, even the dreaded Something That Happened left me unfulfilled in the end, because it didn't really resolve, at least to me, in any kind of satisfactory way.

    There's also a red alligator that figures in the story for quite awhile, and I kept wanting its importance to be revealed -- surely a red alligator must have some symbolic meaning, right? Or if not symbolic importance, it's such an unusual thing that it must have some massive importance to the storyline! Maybe if I had to write a term paper I could make something up, but if I'm honest with myself... I just didn't get it. I don't know why it's in the story at all, really.

    I hate that this is such a negative review, because I do feel strongly about the beauty of Russell's prose. She's a good, maybe even great, writer, and better than a lot of authors I've read this year. But I've found that many times I can overlook mediocre writing when the story is engaging, and here... I guess gorgeous writing didn't really make up for a story that didn't do much for me. Which is a shame.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    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!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Really liked Russell's writing, but can't say I was overly taken with the plot, in the end; it was just a bit too bizarre for me. Karen Russell's really got a way with words, though, and I'll definitely be looking forward to her next.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    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.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Once again I must walk to the beat of a different drummer. This book has been praised by reviewers of many different publications and websites and I just don't understand why. I was looking forward to reading this book with it's kooky characters and quirky premise. To me it was a struggle to get through and if I hadn't been confined to an airplane with no other reading material, I would have abandoned it early on.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the blurbs on the dust jacket of my lovely copy of Swamplandia! comes from Joseph O'Neill and calls Russell "an unfairly talented writer." This blurb struck me immediately, because in some ways, Russell is overly gifted. She has a preternatural sense of the descriptive, which for me is one of the things I most treasure in the books that I love. For example, here is the narrator Ava discussing what would happen if she were ever to leave her family's island home:I would vanish on the mainland, dry up in that crush of cars and strangers, of flesh hidden inside metallic colors, the salt white of the sky over the interstate highway, the strange pink-and-white apartment complexes where mainlanders lived like cutlery in drawers.Or here, Kiwi, Ava's brother fills out a medical history:Kiwi had to answer pages and pages of questions about himself. Nope to measles, never to mumps, scabies, diabetes. He'd had two weeklong bouts of weird dreaming and terrible chills when he was six that his mom referred to as "grasshopper fever," but who knew how that illness translated into mainland etiology? Old crackers in the swamp used bear piss to cure chicken pox. One section of the form was called "Family History." Well, for starters, my sixteen-year-old sister is crazy, she has aural and visual hallucinations ... my youngest sister is an equestrian of Mesozoic lizards ... my father wears a headdress ... my grandfather bites men now.This quote gives some idea of what the book is about. Russell tells the story of the Bigtree family, Florida islanders who own an alligator wrestling themepark. Hilola Bigtree, mother of Ava and Kiwi, is the star wrestler until she passes away from cancer, after which the park gradually - and then rapidly- declines in popularity and begins to die as well. To compound the slump, along the freeway in mainland Loomis, the nearest city, another theme park is being built. This park is called The World of Darkness and is hell themed. Eventually, all of the tourists are gone, the ferry comes no more, and the Chief - head of the Bigtree clan - leaves for the mainland to pursue "Carnival Darwinism," his plan to reinvent Swamplandia! He leaves his children alone on the island and soon the oldest son Kiwi leaves for the mainland to pursue his destiny as a self-labeled genius. Ossie, the oldest daughter, has fallen in love with a ghost (seriously, an actual ghost) and the youngest of the children, Ava, is left trying to fill her mother's shoes by becoming the next great Bigtree alligator wrestler.Ava is the main first person narrator of the story, but there are also third person limited chapters in the voice of Kiwi that commence once he leaves for the mainland. Most of the humor in the novel is found in these chapters, as Kiwi finds himself immersed in a world that is radically different than what he expected, and in which the reader can finally recognize her world. Kiwi is an outcast on Swamplandia! and is surprised to find that he is an outcast on the mainland as well.In fact, all of the characters in the novel are so strange that their story can often verge on the grotesque, and yet, Ava is a empathetic protagonist, who despite her bravado, reveals herself through the novel as the lost child that she is. Her story grows darker and darker, and also more compelling, as the novel progresses. Up until the last page, Ava refuses the vulnerability that the reader sees, and envisions herself as the rock at the center of her family, the anchor. There is certainly dramatic irony here, and the end of the book can seem rather bleak.I just finished the book, and I should perhaps let it settle in my mind a bit longer, but I found the ending appropriate, timely in fact. The fate that befalls the Bigtrees is one that is familiar in our current America. The Bigtrees, as odd as they may be, are entrepreneurs in a pure sense. They have a small family business that is encroached upon by the "mainland" corporate world. Their island is literally encroached upon as well, by a government introduced invasive species of swamp plant. Although their world is magical, foreign, and often frightening, it is a microcosm for the understandable world in which we live. I didn't love every bit of this book. It is rich and lush and descriptive, but it is not tremendously plot-driven, which made it a slow read. I have been reading a lot of "quick reads" lately, so it tested my patience. I loved the Kiwi chapters, and wished there were more of them, although by the end of the novel, I was wrapped up in Ava's story as well. In the end, I recommend this book for anyone who- like I do - appreciates the fine art of descriptive detail and purposeful quirkiness and who wants to get lost in the always strange, sometimes wonderfully magical and sometimes darkly Gothic world of the Swamp. FTC: I received a copy of this book from the publisher.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A heroine as poignant and lovable as Scout Finch, and an evocative setting indeed. I have a strange fascination for Florida and its geography and history, though I'd just hate hate hate to live there. But I hope dearly there's a red Seth paddling around amongst the mangroves somewhere.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have read two of Russell's short stories in the Best American Short Story anthologies, but I have not read her published collection. Still, the stories that I read lead me to buy Swamplandia! within days of it's release. This book continues in a similar, although more realistic, vain as the title story of her collection -- St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. The premise of Swamplandia! -- a family of alligator wrestlers, running a struggling amusement park on a desolate island off the gulf coast of Florida -- strains the imagination, but the reader can still accept the situation and the characters as plausible residents of the so-called, "real-world." This is likely because the members of the Bigtree family are each carefully drawn characters who we get to know intimately. This is even true for the matriarch of the family, who has died before the action of the book takes place. It is especially true for the "heroine" of the book, Ava, who narrates a portion of the story. Indeed, Russell seems most comfortable with her characters and less so with the actions that they undertake. The main action of one of the duel plots is a journey through the swamp that Ava undertakes with a mysterious man called the "Bird Man." Their journey is exciting and contains beautiful descriptions of the swamp, but it is, after all, simply a water-logged journey. That their mission, their destination, was unique, wasn't enough for me. It felt done before.Also, one published review that I read mentions that the end game felt overly rushed. I agree. The journey plodded along in at a pleasant, but somewhat slow place, until it seems Russell felt that it needed to end (it did) and did what she needed to do to end it.The New Yorker chose Ms. Russell as one of their "20 under 40." I have not read enough recently to say, with authority, that their decision was "spot on," but I can say that despite some reservations with the book as a whole, the characters in Swamplandia! were interesting enough that I am looking forward to seeing who Ms. Russell introduces us to next.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    well written, but slow paced. i didn't like all the build up to the happy ending.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Swamplandia! is a novel by Karen Russell. Swamplandia! is also a place, one of Florida's Ten Thousand Islands, and a tourist attraction, and it's always written with an exclamation point, which never failed to amuse or touch me, depending on the context, throughout the book. Swamplandia! is rundown and hokey and pretty seedy, but the Bigtree family (a self-styled tribe with "not a drop of Seminole or Miccosuke blood") is inordinately proud of their outfit. It was once the "Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Cafe in the area." It featured a Bigtree museum (housing family photographs and outgrown clothing, among other things), alligator breeding tanks (all of Swamplandia!'s alligators are called "Seth"), and an alligator wrestling show. The entire family--the Chief and his wife, the lovely Hilola, and their three children, Kiwi (the oldest, a boy), Osceola (a girl), and Ava, help keep the place running. Ava is even apprenticed to her mother, who is the star attraction. The Bigtrees are tightknit and proud and happy together in their isolation.But when Hilola dies of ovarian cancer the family and all they've built together starts to unravel. First, the ethereal Osceola begins to commune with ghosts...then she starts dating them. Kiwi runs away to the city to seek his fortune (and an education); there he finds a job with the brand new World of Darkness attraction, a giant corporate competitor that doesn't even know Swamplandia! exists. And finally, the Chief heads off the island on a business trip, leaving the two girls alone. When Osceola "elopes" with her ghost boyfriend, Ava elicits the help of a stranger who calls himself the Birdman, to help her find Osceola.What ensues is an eerie journey through the primeval swamp in which the Ten Thousand Islands are situated. Ava's journey through the swamp to find the underworld has been called magical, and it is. It is also fraught with dread, for the reader as much as for Ava herself. Who is this Birdman? Why in the world would he tell a little girl he could lead her to the underworld? Can this possibly end well?Well. It does and it doesn't. But Swamplandia!, packed as it is with gorgeous and often clever writing (one of my favorites: all of the young employees of the World of Darkness simply refer to it as "the World," a fact which makes young Kiwi mentally squirm even as he finds himself taking up the practice), atmosphere of place so rich you could eat it with a spoon, and quirky but still well-developed characters, is truly a winner.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I'm absolutely loving this book. It's 4 in the morning and I'm still up reading. I don't want to put it down!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I find myself torn as to just how I feel about this novel, and I don't know how to talk about it without throwing down spoilers, so here's your preemptive warning... SPOILERS TO APPEAR.The Bigtree family begins to collapse, along with their alligator wrestling show, called Swamplandia!, following the death of their mother. Each family member responds to this in different ways. Chief, the father, launches into denial and seeks desperate means to save the show. Kiwi, the eldest, believing himself a genius, goes to the mainland in order to gain an education and save his family. Ossie, the middle child, begins to have romantic relationships with ghosts. And Ava, the youngest, wants to follow in her mother's footsteps by becoming the greatest alligator wrestler there is and in this way also save the Swamplandia! show. My initial gut discomfort began early on. Right before picking up this book (and I mean literally the same day), I had been reading from the This Is Not Native blog, which explains how inappropriate it is for non-natives to be wearing headdresses and dressing like natives as if it were a costume. It's a participation in erasing the culture through stereotyping. So, to see right up front the non-native Bigtree family dressing as native, participating in redface, and claiming a heritage that isn't their own was instantly problematic for me. On the one hand, I understand that this aspect of their characters ties into the families tendency to create a fictional history for themselves, as well as their denial of reality in general. On the other hand, it shows how much mainstream society fails to recognize just how problematic it is for non-natives to be claiming native history and portraying it as homogenous, when it's not. But as I continued reading, I found there was so much more to this book. I loved the world Russell presents with her rich descriptions of the swamp and its wildlife. It really comes alive, and I could almost picture myself there, slogging through the mud and swatting mosquitoes from my head. Even Kiwi's tortuous experience of the mainland with its own degrading realities was detailed and vivid. The World of Darkness theme park was a place both fascinating and horrifying, a true underworld. I loved Ossie's exploration of the supernatural. Whether what she experienced was real, or not, she believed to an extent that made Ava believe. Meanwhile (and here's where the SPOILERS really start), when Ossie runs away with her ghost boyfriend, Ava seeks the held of a mystical Bird Man (someone who can talk to birds and play pied piper to get them off your property), who takes her deep in the swamp in search of the underworld, where her sister was thought to have fled. I was enraptured with Ava's journey to the underworld with the Bird Man. I can't even begin to express my disappointment when I found out that the underworld was not real and the Bird Man was not mystical. The world was just the world, and the Bird Man was just an ordinary man who does what men who lead little girls out into the wild are likely to do. My heart was broken by this. Russell makes the magic, as seen through Ava's eyes, seem so real, and the collapse into reality is so crushing. In a sense, I see how this reflects the Russell's skill, because my own emotional experience matched hers. I didn't want to see reality anymore than Ava wanted to see reality. What else would a strange man be than just a man? What else would the swamp be other than just the swamp? Both Ava and I wanted to believe she would find both her sister and the ghost of her mother, and we both should have known better, and god, ouch. That was a literary punch to the gut, if I ever read one. Just writing about it now makes me want to cry (I almost threw the book across the room).The downfall was my disappointment was so great, I couldn't get back into the same love for the story I was feeling before. I kinda wish her reality hadn't been so brutal, and that some magic could have been recovered. I got over it enough to continue reading, and am glad I did, because I like where the story went from there and how the family came together, despite it all. The final ending (by which I mean, the last sentence), however, didn't have enough of an impact for me. I read that last paragraph three times to try to get the sense of conclusion, of summing up, even if it's a "life goes on" or "the story doesn't end" kind of thing, but it just didn't resonate. I'm sure some will disagree, but, yeah. So, I guess my final analysis is that I really liked it with some strong reservations.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The Bigtree family??The Chief?, his wife Hilola Jane, and their three children Kiwi, Osecola, and Ava?live on a small island in the Everglades, where they run an alligator-wrestling theme park, Swamplandia! But their sheltered world falls apart Hilola dies and shortly afterwards a new amusement park, World of Darkness, opens on the mainland, stealing most of Swamplandia?s business. The Chief leaves to try and find donors who can provide a much-needed injection of cash, Kiwi takes a job at The World of Darkness, and Ossie falls in love with a ghost named Louis Thanksigiving. When she disappears as well, 13-year-old Ava sets off with Bird Man, a local man who dresses in a coat of bird feathers, to look for the Underworld, where she hopes to find both Ossie and her dead mother.Russell?s prose is masterful. Here she is describing Kiwi?s somewhat pretentious attempts at using a big vocabulary: ?He had been bungling his SAT building-block words for months now?he pronounced ?fatuous? so that it fit the meet of ?SpaghettiOs?.? But despite her ability to create clever and surprising turns of phrase like this, the book in the end was tedious?so tedious that I abandoned it about 2/3 of the way through.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A very good book, well worth reading, but somehow falls short of astounding or perfection. It tells the story of the (self-named) Bigtree family who live in a Florida swamp/island and operate Swamplandia!, a decaying alligator wrestling attraction. The story opens with "The Beginning of the End" as a slick new attraction opens on the mainland, threatening Swamplandia! The father goes off to fix the situation, his eldest son runs off to work at the new attraction, and the youngest daughter goes on a journey to the "underworld" to find her sister who she thinks has been kidnapped by a ghost.

    An aura of magic lies over the entire book but at times the stark, depressing reality that these dreams and delusions float over is exposed. In the end, it is an unconventional family story that deals in only partial and ambiguous triumphs of reality over fantasy.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I will admit, Swamplandia! had a strong opening that set the stage for what could have been a beautiful novel, but it went downhill from there. The basic setup is that there is this family that lives on there own island in Florida that is also a alligator theme park. There is the mom, the dad (chief), two sisters and a brother. Well, mom is dead in a few pages and soon we realize that Swamplandia! is not what it seems to be. There were some highpoints in this book, though. Lots of humor and descriptive, beautiful writing. The plot just seemed to lag to me, very slow and boring. Swamplandia! is not a bad book, well worth the read for some of the writing, but not if you are expecting much of anything to happen.