Swamplandia! / Karen Russell

Oversized billboards on Florida’s byways beckon tourists to Swamplandia!, an Everglades sideshow that features the Bigtree family wrestling and swimming with ‘gators (they call them Seths) in a nostalgic tourist trap that most readers will recognize. After opening with a hugely engaging first chapter that introduces the quirky members of the Bigtree Family and their unusual business, it all goes quickly to pieces—Hilola Bigtree, the show’s headliner and family matriarch, succumbs to cancer, the “chief” disappears to the mainland, and the home-schooled children are left more or less to their own devices to fend for themselves. Ossie starts dabbling in the occult and hooks up with a ghostly paramour (whose backstory is somewhat superfluously told in significant detail), Kiwi defects to the rival amusement park, and Ava hooks up with an unsavory swamp character she employs in an attempt to bring her sister back from the “other side.”

This novel was noted as one of the ten best books of 2011 by the New York Times, was long-listed for the Orange Prize, and named one of the best southern reads for 2011. I was really looking forward to something special, but it just didn’t connect. There were moments of greatness, but mostly it didn’t work and I really had to slog through the swampy plot to get to the end of it. I found myself wanting to read the prequel to Swamplandia! (a book that hasn’t been written) about Swamplandia! when it was thriving with its quirky and still unblemished denizens, the Bigtree Family.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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