This book was thoroughly imaginative with fully realized characters and beautiful prose. That said, if there were a way to pluck a story out of my mind to make it as though I had never read it, I'd probably choose this story.

I think part of the problem is the way this was marketed, as though it were a quirky , fun story with a cutesy cover and a side show title. The next thing you know you are reading about a child being raped, a family losing their home and identity aproud old man wasting away in a nursing home- an adolescent boy losing his virginity in a meaningless way a teenage girl being medicated into zombiehood-the lsit goes on. I know that not all books have to have a happy ending and I do not dispute this writer's talent, if she weren't so talaented, I'd not feel so bad. ( )

This is an odd book. It has an air of unreality, yet I can't call it magical realism, and in the end it collapses into prosaic convention. It is humorous, yet harshly treats two-thirds of its main characters, and can you call a book that includes the rape of a child humorous? I think not. Then there's the setting in the swamps of Florida, inherently an odd and unusual place.

The story is about the Bigtree family of tourist attraction Swamplandia! fame, where they run an alligator-wrestling themed park on their own little island in the swamp. The adults are quickly removed from the scene: the mother dies shortly before the novel opens, and the father soon moves to the mainland to "raise money".

The book is then split in half. One half follows older brother Kiwi, 16, who moves to the mainland and takes a low paying grunt job with competing theme park World of Darkness. Kiwi is treated much better than any other character. He is endearingly painted as a type of sheltered, naive home-schooled kid too smart for his own good. Picked on and called gay by a bully, he thinks to recite poetry to him on the idea that its inherent beauty will be recognized and appreciated. Ha ha. He says something is "ominous", but only having seen the word in books, pronounces it like "dominoes".

Despite his serious lack of preparedness for dealing with mainland life and other people, he finds friends who look out for him, a beautiful girl to relieve him of his virginity, and the great luck to be recruited as a trainee pilot for the park, a skill he seems to learn with ease. Kiwi's chapters are generally funny, and he does well.

His younger sisters are a completely different story. Left behind on the island by Kiwi and their father, Osceola (14 or 15) is either dangerously mentally ill or a spirit medium capable of interacting with ghosts, whom she "dates". She runs off on an abandoned dredge barge to marry one of these ghosts, an adventure which will not end well.

That leaves Ava, 12 or 13, who takes over the other half of the narrative. At the same time her sister leaves her all by herself on the island, a strange older man appears. He convinces Ava that her sister likely is indeed in communication with the dead and on the way to the Underworld, and only he can help guide Ava to the Underworld in pursuit of her sister to rescue her. Ava, smart but all too credulous, goes off through the swamps with this man, and the outcome is that of a dark after-school special. Or it would be if there were any exploration of the aftermath, which there is not - Ava escapes, is eventually rescued and reunited with her family, and there it ends. This pisses off a lot of readers, apparently, which I can understand.

So Karen Russell puts these two girls through hell, not literally as it turns out but certainly figuratively. We have the alternating chapters of their brother as the amusing counterweight, I suppose, yet their suffering cannot be said to be redeemed in any way.

I'm not sure therefore that I would recommend this book to many people, though I did enjoy the reading experience it gave me and was always interested to pick it up again and resume reading. Russell's writing style is accurately described somewhere I saw as "thick"; it is very descriptive. I had to make note of this once sentence: rather than say something as mundane as "she saw him walking towards her", she writes, "Across the room, the Bird Man's antique boots were coming toward me, the toes addressing the air like sniffing noses, and slowly I gathered up the long length of him: trousered legs, brace of feathers, face, hat." ( )

I found this book to be an unsatisfying slog and I think I only just now figured out why. Swamplandia has everything I like in it; it’s a pure Southern Gothic with grotesque characters and a bizarre location, a fantasy that becomes real through the perspective of a child protagonist, a grim look at a dysfunctional family. Superficially I should adore this book. But I feel like all of these elements are just sort of thrown in together without becoming any kind of cohesive whole. I’ll give an example: the setting is a weird amusement park buried deep in the Florida Swamp. So there is this element of children growing up in a crazy, borderline dysfunctional but totally fun environment. Check. But the mother died! It’s as though the soul of the place were gone. The father is in a deep depression and nobody is coming to see the show anymore. The once fun setting has died and only its corpse remains; a zombie place that sucks the vitality out of the father and threatens to consume the kids as well. Check. Karen Russell combined the running-away-to-the-circus narrative with the grim-castle-on-the-moors narrative. This should be Wuthering Heights meets World of Wonders. But it doesn’t work. Why?

I think it’s because it’s just too much at once. We don’t get a taste of what the circus was like when it was full of vitality we just see its lifeless remains afterward. So we’re stuck with processing both tropes at once without any time to digest. This whole book felt like that, all these positive elements unevenly blended together. It’s like a fantasy book with both vampires and steampunk. Stick to one! Or start with one and slowly work your way to the other. Just don’t get greedy.
( )

Eh,

I really wanted to like this, but I found it to be annoying quirky, moreso than even Miranda July.
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Back in my totally middle class 70's childhood, my family used to go camping down in Florida and in various other places where strange roadside attractions loomed. I always wondered about the families that ran those reptile zoos or collections of plaster dinosaurs or bizarre ersatz "Native American" teepee huts. My dad was always too cheap to take us to any of the really good attractions, like Disney world or 6 Flags or anything like that, so our days were spent in places where a disenchanted alligator would yawn at us and we would look, frantically, in the gifte shoppes in the hope of finding something to make our visits worthwhile. Of course, my dad would never buy us anything that we asked for, so most of the time was spent in trying to indicate wants without actually saying them, but that's another story.
Swamplandia is a totally perfect rendition of what I always imagined those families to be like. I wallowed in this book. I felt the mosquitoes, the heat, the despair of living on not enough money and trying to be a star. I could see the curling-up posters on the wall, the postcards that were printed slightly off so the red poked out from behind the picture a bit.
It's not a really cheerful book. Things go bad and then things get worse and so on, but the characters seem to just take most of it in stride and succeed in their own way, nonetheless. One doesn't get the same emotional drenching as one would, say, in a Joy Fielding novel about the same situation. The floating along-ness goes with the pace of the book. Emotions aren't plumbed to their very depths - when something really bad happens, it's just described, and we move on. It's not less horrible for that - it instead speaks to the expectations of this family. They survive because they don't hope for better. As Mary Engelbreit's brightly cheerful poster says, "Life is just so daily!" And yet. Despite their calmness, I found myself rooting for the whole family throughout the book, wishing them well. Heck, I'd go to Swamplandia myself, just to see the swimming act... ( )