Swamplandia!

Swamplandia!
Genre : Fiction
Published : 3 Mar 2011 - Chatto & Windus
The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline and Swamplandia!, their island home in the Florida Everglades and gator-wrestling theme park, is swiftly being encroached upon by a sophisticated competitor known as The World of Darkness. Ava, a resourceful but terrified twelve year old, must manage seventy gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief. Her mother, Swamplandia!’s legendary and beautiful star attraction, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her Grandpa Sawtooth has been sent to the mainland to an old folk’s home; her brother has secretly defected to The World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep the family afloat; and her father, the Chief, 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.

SWAMPLANDIA! is a dark and mythic story, bursting with energy and an unstoppable inventiveness, by a writer with an astonishingly original and exuberant imagination

Reviews

Brilliant, funny, original.

Stephen King

An accomplished first novel... its wonders [are] wonderful indeed... One is looking, more than anything, for originality, authority, and verve, all of which SWAMPLANDIA! [possesses] in abundance.

Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer prize-winning author of THE HOURS

Vividly worded, exuberant in characterization, the novel is a wild ride: Russell has style in spades … If the gothic whimsy of this novel is sometimes too self-conscious, the pleasures it offers are unforced.

The New York Times

The novel packs a genuine punch.

Telegraph

Russell's strength is her use of language: each sentence is vividly rendered and the pages are as dense with images as the island is with life.

Fiona Wilson, The Times

[An] impressive debut novel … Ms Russell has produced a rich and humid world of spirits and dreams, buzzing mosquitoes and prehistoric reptiles, baby-green cocoplums and marsh rabbits, and musty old tomes about heroes and spells. With Ava she has created a goofy and self-conscious girl who is young enough to hope that all darkness has an answering lightness.

The Economist

This exuberant fantastical romp about alligator wrestlers in the Florida Everglades by acclaimed author Karen Russell is, simply put, fun... The book is funny, energetic and steams along at a fast-pace, filled with oddball characters and a world so intensely unique yet strangely familiar, you’ll be swept along for the ride from the first page.

Book Trust

If this book does not represent one of the first instances in recent literary memory where work of the mainstream Anglo-American tradition reaches to align itself with the richly evocative, distinctly immigrant aesthetic that has characterized many of the most notable books of the last few decades, then it is certainly among the best of those attempts... Russell creates warm, lively characters whose interactions with one another are spontaneous and organic.

Chantal James, Paste Magazine

Russell's primeval imaginings and gutsy language lurk long in the memory.

Independent

Beautifully written and very witty, yet often extremely sad.

Bookbag

Russell’s greatest skill may be at building a world that’s just a few degrees off of our own, a place where everything is just strange enough that the membrane between life and death seems permeable, and a theme park based around the idea of visiting hell seems downright reasonable.

A.V Club

A suspenseful, deeply haunted book.

New Yoek Times

Magical realism, American style; lush language, larger-than-life surrealism, a vertiginous line on every page between hopes, dreams and reality, a disorienting mirage of a book. What holds it all together is the voice. Russell's writing is clear, rhythmic and dependable, even as her imagination runs wild.

Los Angeles Times

Russell deftly dips into several story lines. And though she trolls some pretty dark waters (abandonment, consumerism, hungry swamp things), there’s magic in discovering how everyone stays afloat.

Dailycandy.com

There’s no doubting the sheer talent of SWAMPLANDIA!’s 29-year-old author. Words and ideas seemingly pour from her inventive mind in a torrent.

National Post

Russell's willingness to lend flesh and blood to her fanciful, fantastical creations gives this spry novel a potent punch and announces an enthralling new beginning for a quickly evolving young author.

Publishers Weekly

Ms Russell has produces a rich and humid world of spirits and dreams, buzzing mosquitoes and prehistoric reptiles, baby-green cocoplums and marsh rabbits, and musty old tomes about heroes and spells. With Ava she has created a goofy and self-conscious girl who is young enough to hope that all darkness has an answering lightness. Inevitably she must learn otherwise. Swamplandia! is ultimately about the aching beauties of youth - the way life begins with such dumb sweetness, while the lessons that give it meaning lurk around each bend like terrifying gators in a mossy fragrant swamp.

The Economist

The tale of the two flyaway sisters proves lyrically powerful as it maps the enchanted but dangerous worlds that young minds can conjure to deal with grief.

Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times

It's a wonderfully extravagant, eccentric story by a brilliant young writer with an amazing imagination.

Kate Saunders The Times

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