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.