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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