School Library Journal Review
Mere months after their mother dies, the Bigtree family's alligator-wrestling theme park and cafe, Swamplandia!, goes out of business, sending the abandoned siblings on individual perilous journeys away from home in this dazzling, affecting, funny novel. (Feb.) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Few novelists debut with as much hearty recommendation as Russell, a New Yorker 20-under-40 whose cunning first novel germinates a seed planted in her much-loved collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. We return to Swamplandia!, the once-thriving Florida tourist attraction where the Bigtree clan-Ava, Ossie, Kiwi, and the Chief-wrestles alligators. After the death of mother Hilola-the park's star alligator wrestler-Ava, the youngest Bigtree, takes her place in the spotlight while her sister, Ossie, elopes with a ghostly man named Louis Thanksgiving, and brother Kiwi winds up sweeping floors at Swamplandia!'s competition. Worst of all is the disappearance of the Chief, spurring Ava to embark upon a rescue mission that will take her from the Gulf of Mexico to the gates of hell, occasionally assisted by an unlikely extended family that includes the geriatric Grandpa Sawtooth, the Bird Man, and a tiny red alligator with the potential to save the park. 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. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Russell's lavishly imagined and spectacularly crafted first novel sprang from a story in her highly praised collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006). Swamplandia! is a shabby tourist attraction deep in the Everglades, owned by the Bigtree clan of alligator wrestlers. When Hilola, their star performer, dies, her husband and children lose their moorings, and Swamplandia! itself is endangered as audiences dwindle. The Chief leaves. Brother Kiwi, 17, sneaks off to work at the World of Darkness, a new mainland amusement park featuring the rings of hell. Otherworldly sister Osceola, 16, vanishes after falling in love with the ghost of a young man who died while working for the ill-fated Dredge and Fill Campaign in the 1930s. It's up to Ava, 13, to find her sister, and her odyssey to the Underworld is mythic, spellbinding, and terrifying. Russell's powers reside in her profound knowledge of the great imperiled swamp, from its alligators and insects, floating orchids and invasive strangler melaleuca trees to the tragic history of its massacred indigenous people and wildlife. Ravishing, elegiac, funny, and brilliantly inquisitive, Russell's archetypal swamp saga tells a mystical yet rooted tale of three innocents who come of age through trials of water, fire, and air.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In 2006, Zoetrope published a story by a 24-year-old writer, Karen Russell. That story, "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," featured a lusciously strange setting (an alligator theme park in the Everglades) and a tough young heroine with a dead mother and an absent father, as well as a weird problem: how to save her resented-yet-beloved older sister from eloping with a ghost. A few months later, Russell's first story collection, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," with "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" leading a crazy procession of nine other Florida swampland stories, won her wide acclaim, and last year she was chosen one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" top fiction writers. Now her fans can sink their teeth into her first novel, "Swamplandia!," a sort of expansion of and sequel to that alligator story. Vividly worded, exuberant in characterization, the novel is a wild ride: Russell has style in spades. The setting and the sisters (Ava and Osceola, aka Ossie) are the same, but they now benefit from a full back story. It's easier to care about the pleasures and miseries of life in a failing gator park when we know how the father (the self-proclaimed Chief Bigtree) and his family ended up there, and are led to understand what goes into the routine of putting on death-defying shows every day. If Russell's style is a North American take on magical realism, then her commitment to life's nitty-gritties anchors the magic; we are more inclined to suspend disbelief at the moments that verge on the paranormal because she has turned "Swamplandia!" into a credible world. The Bigtrees' story gains resonance, too, when we learn the Everglades' history of governmental mishandling (the seeds of invasive melaleuca trees were sprinkled from airplanes in the 1940s) and environmental disaster; at times the family's stranded island stands in for the nation or even the planet. And the landscape itself is a polymorphous symbol for the ambiguities of adolescence - "tides maniacally revised the coastlines," Ava tells us - as well as for other disasters like the disease that killed her mother: melaleucas swallow 50 acres a day with "a haywire fertility, like a body making cancer." Ava is a highly appealing narrator who has many talents beyond swimming with gators or taping their jaws shut. If protagonists (especially of first novels) typically bewail the mundanity of their small towns, the exotic is normal to Ava. Her first-person narration is not a transcription of a 13-year-old voice, but an evocation, in adult language, of a barely adolescent mind-set. This allows for a dazzling level of linguistic invention. Here Russell as Ava describes the dozen houses on pilings that make up the abandoned outpost of Stiltsville: "dawn light screaming through the doorways that hung on their hinges, the broken windows that birds could fly through, the plank lace, the cheesed metals." The Bird Man, a feather-coated drifter with a knack for getting troublesome birds to move on, takes on full life in the second half of the novel. "Swamp people are this country's last outlaws, kid," he tells Ava. "We have to stick together." But the cup of kindness turns out to be poisoned. Wearing the double face of guide and devil, the Bird Man takes Ava on a long, hellish boat journey in search of her sister. The flashes of quirky humor in "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" have ripened into high comedy in the novel, mostly thanks to a new character, Kiwi, the pragmatic 17-year-old brother to these wild sisters. Kiwi leaves his family a "Valedictory Note" expressing his "insuperable horror at the mismanagement of Swamplandia! and the poverty of our island education." Escaping from Swamplandia! with the hope of paying off its debts, he takes a McJob at the World of Darkness, the rival theme park 40 miles away. The central joke is that his home-schooled erudition has left him as ill equipped for mainland life as some time traveler. "Telling your fellow workers that you were going to Harvard was a request to have your testicles compared to honey-roasted peanuts and your status as a virgin confirmed, your virginity suddenly as radiant and evident to all as a wad of toilet paper that was stuck to your shoe." While Kiwi's manager, Carl Jenks, is a petty tyrant, his co-worker Vijay is a self-assured pothead who takes a benign interest in the new boy's re-education. When Kiwi responds to a question - "Oh, O.K. Right-o" - Vijay cracks "one reddened eye at him" and demands: "Right-o? Are you Sherlock Holmes? Have I taught you nothing?" As Kiwi labors in the overtly Dantesque World of Darkness (where the customers are addressed as Lost Souls), Southern Gothic meets deadpan corporate satire to hilarious effect. His situation is a modern take on that of a miner in a company town; after three 60-hour weeks he finds he somehow owes the corporation $182.57. On his first day as a lifeguard, he is handed a list of the links in "The Drowning Chain": "Lack of Education, Lack of Protection, Lack of Safety Advice, Lack of Supervision, Inability to Cope." It's a reprise of the Bigtrees' childhood, lightly delivered. AT times, the Kiwi (third person) and Ava (first person) sections read like two different books, and while this can be refreshing it does make the novel feel uneven. Readers may wonder why only two of the three siblings are allowed to tell their stories as Ossie remains offstage, missing in the swamp, for much of the novel - especially as her ghost boyfriend, the 17-year-old Depression-era dredgeman Louis Thanksgiving, gets a superb 17-page bildungsroman of his own. The answer may be that Ossie is less a character than an alter ego for Ava: the madwoman in her attic, the other side of puberty, the fallen Eve to her stroppy Lilith. The parents have a much more solid feel, even though the mother, Hilola Bigtree, has died at 36. Ava is Hilola's understudy in the alligator show and the chief mourner: "Every rock on the island, every swaying tree branch or dirty dish in our house was like a word in a sentence that I could read about my mother." All the detritus Hilola has left behind attests to her reality, from her baggy swimsuits to the trophy for an alligator-wrestling contest that, in a moment of gut-knotting disappointment, Ava learns is not quite what it seems. The family's loss is visceral: failing to do the laundry, the girls spray their clothes with an old 1970s perfume of their mother's. And it is Hilola's urgent, protective presence that brings this moving novel to its climax. As for the father, he is pathetic in his grandiose bossiness as much as in his unspoken grief. "Be the Chief again," Ava silently urges him, and he does give it his best shot. The plot of "Swamplandia!" is nothing special - dysfunctional family pull apart, then pull together - but the execution is. This family, wrestling with their desires and demons, will neither succumb nor triumph, but survive in their scarred way, and will lodge in the memories of anyone lucky enough to read "Swamplandia!" If the gothic whimsy of this novel is sometimes too self-conscious, the pleasures it offers are unforced. As the wooden sign at the entrance to the Gator Pit says, "You Watchers in the First Four Rows Guaranteed to Get Wet!" To read an interview with Emma Donoghue, visit nytimes.com/bookreview 'Swamp people are this country's last outlaws, kid,' a sinister drifter says. 'We have to stick together.' Emma Donoghue's latest novel, "Room," was one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2010.
Library Journal Review
The Tamiami Trail, a two-lane road connecting the wealthy city of Naples with bustling, multicultural Miami, cuts through a river of grass known as the Florida Everglades. This wonderfully unique combination of wildwood hammock and cypress slough has been home to the mound-building Calusa, then the Seminoles, and now the quirkiest, most delightful group of all, the fictitious Bigtrees. A once-thriving destination for blue-haired tourists from the Midwest, Swamplandia boasted airboat rides and alligator wrestling until the death of the feature performer, matriarch Hilola Bigtree. The grieving chief fails to recognize that his kids are suffering, too. Osceola, the oldest daughter, communes with the dead. Kiwi, her brother, makes a pact with the devil, the Disney-esque attraction, World of Darkness, and precocious Ava secretly nurtures a rare red alligator, hoping to revive the family business. Like a kinder, gentler Carl Hiaasen, Russell manages to skewer all the Florida bad guys-Big Sugar, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Casino Gaming Commission-while writing a love song to paradise and innocence lost. Verdict This wildly imaginative debut novel, coming on the heels of the short story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, delivers on Russell's status as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. A phantasmagorical tale of teens left on their own to battle their demons, mixed with a brief history of the Sunshine State, Russell's book will appeal to young adults as well as their folks. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/10.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
