Swamplandia!
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Review
`Karen Russell's first novel Swamplandia! Is a deeply affecting, entertaining and fantastical story.' --Vogue,
`I was looking forward to Swamplandia! and I wasn't disappointed. I found this novel beautifully written and very witty, yet often extremely sad too' --The Book Bag
`When you start reading a book, it's either sink or swim. With Karen Russell's Swamplandia, set in the alligator-infested Florida Everglades, we dove right in and never came up for air...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' --Daily Candy
`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
`Russell details peculiarities about the alligators (known as Seths) to fascinating effect and skillfully satirizes the greed and fraudulence of entertainment corporations' --Times Literary Supplement
`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' --The Sunday Times
`the book certainly abounds in clever and striking images: alligators have "icicle overbites" and Hilola's children "watch her sink into her own face" as she dies of cancer' --Metro
`The Miami-born writer renders the travails and delights of a...dreamlike world that leaves you intoxicated and slightly dishevelled' --Monocle
`It's a wonderfully extravagant, eccentric story by a brilliant young writer with an amazing imagination' --The Times
`Russell's primeval imaginings and gutsy language lurk long in the memory' --The Independent
`The novel packs a genuine punch.'
--Daily Telegraph, Jonathan Gibbs
'This novel has already received great reviews... and it's easy to see why. Many of her descriptions are quite dazzling.' --Guardian
`Her imagination is undoubtedly of unbounded proportions, and she creates a refreshingly unique community and seductively charms the reader...[Russell] is a refreshing change from the usual.' --Platform
`Ava's narrative occupies fertile territory half-way between realism and fantasy, innocence and experience...Russell leaves just enough for us to question our reading of events, so that when the scales fall from Ava's eyes we are implicated in her naivety.'
--London Review of Books
`We unanimously loved it - to the point where words like `genius' and `masterpiece' were being bandied around. With figurative language enriching every sentence, Russell effortlessly transports the reader.' --Cambridgeshire Journal
`I was looking forward to Swamplandia! and I wasn't disappointed. I found this novel beautifully written and very witty, yet often extremely sad too' --The Book Bag
`When you start reading a book, it's either sink or swim. With Karen Russell's Swamplandia, set in the alligator-infested Florida Everglades, we dove right in and never came up for air...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' --Daily Candy
`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
`Russell details peculiarities about the alligators (known as Seths) to fascinating effect and skillfully satirizes the greed and fraudulence of entertainment corporations' --Times Literary Supplement
`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' --The Sunday Times
`the book certainly abounds in clever and striking images: alligators have "icicle overbites" and Hilola's children "watch her sink into her own face" as she dies of cancer' --Metro
`The Miami-born writer renders the travails and delights of a...dreamlike world that leaves you intoxicated and slightly dishevelled' --Monocle
`It's a wonderfully extravagant, eccentric story by a brilliant young writer with an amazing imagination' --The Times
`Russell's primeval imaginings and gutsy language lurk long in the memory' --The Independent
`The novel packs a genuine punch.'
--Daily Telegraph, Jonathan Gibbs
'This novel has already received great reviews... and it's easy to see why. Many of her descriptions are quite dazzling.' --Guardian
`Her imagination is undoubtedly of unbounded proportions, and she creates a refreshingly unique community and seductively charms the reader...[Russell] is a refreshing change from the usual.' --Platform
`Ava's narrative occupies fertile territory half-way between realism and fantasy, innocence and experience...Russell leaves just enough for us to question our reading of events, so that when the scales fall from Ava's eyes we are implicated in her naivety.'
--London Review of Books
`We unanimously loved it - to the point where words like `genius' and `masterpiece' were being bandied around. With figurative language enriching every sentence, Russell effortlessly transports the reader.' --Cambridgeshire Journal
Book Description
A triumphant debut novel and follow-up to Karen Russell's universally acclaimed short story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you are looking for something meaty, beautifully written and genuinley different and origonal, this is the book for you.
Set in an Alligator filled theme park in the swamplands of the Florida Everglades, this is a portrait of a family and of Ava, its main star, trying to recover after the death of Hilola Bigtree, the mother of the family. Each tries to cope and grow up in their own unique ways, whilst the theme of the alligators and their swamplands is linked in throughout the plott and used as a metaphor for many different things.
There are some genuinley fantastic and intruiging descriptions of the alligators and the natural surroundings that fit in so well with the pleasure versus pain principle of the book, its clear to see that the author, Karin Russell, has researched the natural habitat of this book very well indeed.
I have to say that this book is quite devastatingly sad in parts, harrowingly so, and I nearly gave up on it as I thought maybe it was too dark for me, although I love hard hitting books. But- It is so incredibly worth getting through the hard bits in the end. Ava is a resiliant character that is so believable, you cant help but connect with her and turn that page no matter how scary it gets in parts, which is pretty scary.
The plot took some fantastical twists and turns, veering towards the end, almoast ridiculously so, but I think that made me love it even more. The writing style is very descriptive and and intricate.
This is perhaps not a relaxing holliday book, but certainly a great summer read and somthething to get your teeth into! ( excust the pun with the alligators)
Set in an Alligator filled theme park in the swamplands of the Florida Everglades, this is a portrait of a family and of Ava, its main star, trying to recover after the death of Hilola Bigtree, the mother of the family. Each tries to cope and grow up in their own unique ways, whilst the theme of the alligators and their swamplands is linked in throughout the plott and used as a metaphor for many different things.
There are some genuinley fantastic and intruiging descriptions of the alligators and the natural surroundings that fit in so well with the pleasure versus pain principle of the book, its clear to see that the author, Karin Russell, has researched the natural habitat of this book very well indeed.
I have to say that this book is quite devastatingly sad in parts, harrowingly so, and I nearly gave up on it as I thought maybe it was too dark for me, although I love hard hitting books. But- It is so incredibly worth getting through the hard bits in the end. Ava is a resiliant character that is so believable, you cant help but connect with her and turn that page no matter how scary it gets in parts, which is pretty scary.
The plot took some fantastical twists and turns, veering towards the end, almoast ridiculously so, but I think that made me love it even more. The writing style is very descriptive and and intricate.
This is perhaps not a relaxing holliday book, but certainly a great summer read and somthething to get your teeth into! ( excust the pun with the alligators)
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A wonderful hot-bath of a novel. Part Angela Carter-esque cartwheel through childhood, part Bradbury-haunted bayou of Southern Gothic. The story stands tall, interesting and compelling, and the prose is rich and delicious, carefully exorcised of the purple self-indulgence that can creep up in this sort of territory.
There is one moment near the end that is genuinely devastatingly terrifying, a literary somersault of such technical flair I had to do a double-take. For all its charm and delight, this story packs a heart-breaking punch.
It's not perfect - the plot gets a little floopy in places, and the Kiwi stuff, though excellently realised, doesn't always mesh with its sister storyline - but it gets damned close. I would recommend it to anyone.
Hope it does well in the Orange Prize - it deserves it.
There is one moment near the end that is genuinely devastatingly terrifying, a literary somersault of such technical flair I had to do a double-take. For all its charm and delight, this story packs a heart-breaking punch.
It's not perfect - the plot gets a little floopy in places, and the Kiwi stuff, though excellently realised, doesn't always mesh with its sister storyline - but it gets damned close. I would recommend it to anyone.
Hope it does well in the Orange Prize - it deserves it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I read Swamplandia on the basis of the gushing critical reviews and after a long journey spent searching for some nugget of greatness in this book I concluded that their wasn't one. The author has included some elements of Magical Realism without making the magic seem real, or the real seem magic. There is also a culminating scene, perhaps deriving from John Irving's 'Owen Meany', but which fails to have the power to retrospectively add meaning to the earlier parts of the book. Despite the conspicuous research I learned next to nothing about alligators and swamps and only enough about the Army Corps of Engineers to make me want more. The characters are less sympathetic than just pathetic. Some of the plot mechanisms, for example the rescuing of a drowning child, are really clunky. A classic case of a book that is well written but nowhere close to a good read.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A really good novel
This is a really good novel by an author who writes with the fluency of Angela Carter at her best. Touches of Hilary Mantel as well, not her historical fiction but books like... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Michael Marett-crosby
A surprisingly dark and poignant story
Swamplandia! is an alligator-themed amusement park in the Everglades run by Chief Bigtree, his wife, Hilola, and their three children. Read more
Published 12 months ago by H. Skinner
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