Swamplandia! is a 2011 novel by the American writer Karen Russell. The novel is set in the Ten Thousand Islands, off the southwest coast of Florida, it tells the story of the Bigtree family of alligator wrestlers who live in Swamplandia! an alligator-wrestling theme park. Swamplandia! is Russell's first novel. The book originated as a short story, titled "Ava Wrestles the Alligator", published in the Summer 2006 issue of the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, when Russell was 24 years old.
Beautiful writing, interesting characters, terrible plot. After the looking lead up to a horrible incident I didn't care about the plot or the characters any more.
So many things I could say about this book...not sure how much I want to say as our book group doesn't meet for a couple of weeks. I really got lost in Russell's language-she is a master of the flowery sentence. So many metaphors and similes! I was a tad overwhelmed at times, and perhaps got more impatient with the story than was necessary. Overall I thought this was a fantastic novel, but I have a few qualms.
Two and a half stars...This book took me on a journey where I thought I was headed to one destination only to find, nope, i was really going there all along. And nope I didn't want to go there on that particular journey. Was kind of shocked when I disembarked and looked around.
Started good. Quirky and original but then, got weird, then weirder still. Then scary, then ugly, then trite. I don't know. I feel kind of blindsided...
What a captivating novel! I became immersed in this story very quickly. It's quirky, serious, sad, and funny. I picked this up without knowing anything about it at all, and so hesitate to say too much. Meet the Bigtrees, a family making a living (or not) in a bizarre fashion, in the swamps off the coast of Florida. When their way of life starts to unravel after a tragedy, three siblings--Kiwi, Osceola, and Ava, are forced to make sense of what is happening and make decisions about their own survival. Some of these decisions are misguided and downright dangerous. I thought Ava's story was the most compelling, and the way her story is told alternatively with Kiwi's less life-threatening (and occasionally humorous) one makes the book a real page-turner.
Great book!
A well-written portrayal of the loss of innocence and the romanticized view of "home." The pacing was flawed, the end wrapped up a little too quickly and neatly, and I felt like potentially interesting aspects of the story were left unexplored, but I thought the characters were unique and realistic and, overall, it was worth reading.
The title and the blurbs kind of made me want to skip this one. It sounds a touch too quirky for me, maybe. But Karen Russell is an excellent writer. I love the way she shapes the language to the character, especially in Ava's voice. The atmosphere is so haunting, lovely and foreign. The story is original and well-paced, particularly so in the last half. I can't remember barreling through 150 pages of a book with this little regard for the outside world in a long time - my apologies to my family.
Sounds like a five-star review? Though sparely described, thankfully, I'm not giving full marks to any story that includes a rape scene that isn't essential to the plot or development of a character. I suppose this is debatable, but I have no trouble envisioning the whole of this book, the family tragedy and resultant adventure and growth, …
The title and the blurbs kind of made me want to skip this one. It sounds a touch too quirky for me, maybe. But Karen Russell is an excellent writer. I love the way she shapes the language to the character, especially in Ava's voice. The atmosphere is so haunting, lovely and foreign. The story is original and well-paced, particularly so in the last half. I can't remember barreling through 150 pages of a book with this little regard for the outside world in a long time - my apologies to my family.
Sounds like a five-star review? Though sparely described, thankfully, I'm not giving full marks to any story that includes a rape scene that isn't essential to the plot or development of a character. I suppose this is debatable, but I have no trouble envisioning the whole of this book, the family tragedy and resultant adventure and growth, keeping all of its emotional impact intact, without those couple of paragraphs.
In a nutshell: I was beyond excited to read this book. I mean, a family lives in an amusement park in the swamp where they wrestle alligators, and the main character is (supposedly) a kick-ass girl-wrestler-in-training. What's not to love? Alas, it turned out to be one of the biggest disappointments of my reading career.
Ava and her sister believe in magic (ghosts, sailing to the underworld with a mysterious bird man, etc.) and the narration wants you to believe that the magic is right around the corner. Their brother Kiwi, on the other hand, understands the amusement park is failing so he runs away to get a job, which turns out to be the miserable, mundane, menial experience that most minimum-wage jobs promise to be. In the movie version, Ava and Ossie's scenes would be filmy, dreamy, shadowy, and otherworldly; Kiwi's scenes would be filled with dull colors and …
In a nutshell: I was beyond excited to read this book. I mean, a family lives in an amusement park in the swamp where they wrestle alligators, and the main character is (supposedly) a kick-ass girl-wrestler-in-training. What's not to love? Alas, it turned out to be one of the biggest disappointments of my reading career.
Ava and her sister believe in magic (ghosts, sailing to the underworld with a mysterious bird man, etc.) and the narration wants you to believe that the magic is right around the corner. Their brother Kiwi, on the other hand, understands the amusement park is failing so he runs away to get a job, which turns out to be the miserable, mundane, menial experience that most minimum-wage jobs promise to be. In the movie version, Ava and Ossie's scenes would be filmy, dreamy, shadowy, and otherworldly; Kiwi's scenes would be filled with dull colors and smudges and dirt.
Until suddenly the worlds collide when the promise of magic is snatched away and we are made to understand that the world of Swamplandia! is Kiwi's smudgy, dull, dirty world, not Ava's dreamscape. The moment when this happens comes late in the book and, as other reviewers have noted, is truly horrific--a girl is raped by a man who has lured her into a remote part of the swamp. And because it's Kiwi's world after all, aspects of the children's lives that in a semi-alternate reality were merely quirky must be reinterpreted as evidence of profound poverty and neglect.
Things about this book I didn't like:
1. It's disjointed. The book is basically 3 stories -- Ava's and Ossie's, which go together and belong to the same world -- and Kiwi's, which is completely separate and belongs to a different world. But it's not just different worlds that were poorly integrated; this feels like 2 entirely separate books that don't belong together.
2. Consequently, it's incredibly jarring when the horrific event happens -- it's an event that belongs to Kiwi's world, not to Ava and Ossie's world. Bad things can happen both places, but the result of decent world-building is that we have expectations about what can and can't happen in each place, and these expectations are violated. (Think of The Great Escape and Star Wars, which both include horrific events. But it's obvious that blowing up a planet belongs to Star Wars and not The Great Escape.) This is not the kind of novel that breaks conventions, violates expectations, and shapes the future of literature. In this context, violating expectations to that extent is basically the book's announcement that "I don't know what kind of book I am."
3. I wasn't interested in Kiwi's story. At all.
4. I was interested in the premise of Ava's and Ossie's stories. I kept reading because I kept thinking something would happen and I'd get to really experience the magic dreamland in full. Until the horrific event, nothing much happened, just a lot of waiting for something to happen. By the time the horrific event happened, it was too late. I was so thoroughly bored and frustrated by the total failure of anything to happen that I just didn't care.
5. Basically, I wanted this to be a completely different book in every possible way. In this case, I don't think I'm being unfair: this was marketed as an action-packed, semi-otherworldly adventure (there's an exclamation mark in the title, for crying out loud), but it wasn't action-packed or remotely otherworldly, and it wasn't an adventure.
