[electronic resource] :, 336 pages
English language
Published Nov. 8, 2011 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2011Thirteen-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 rival park called The World of Darkness. As Ava sets out on a mission through the magical swamps to save them all, we are drawn into a lush and bravely imagined debut that takes us to the shimmering edge of reality.
Engaging and funny at times, this story about the decline of a theme-park family following the death of the mother (the pivot of the household) and their descent into the reality of contemporary American life is often too grim. In a sense this is magical realism without magic; A good story, but the intertwined parables of the characters lack substance.
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.
