(I believe the only things resembling spoilers I have put in this review are also in all the explanatory blurbs, and so are presumably not really spoilers. I will also say, as a warning, I suppose . . . I had some emotional upheaval that was not the book's fault due to reading it, and I found it impossible to distance myself from that when writing this review, which certainly makes it rather less subjective as a result.)

In thinking about this book, what to say about it, how to describe it, one of the only things that sticks in my mind is pretty much the only thing that made me finish reading it: my mother pressed it upon me, having not read it herself but heard about it and investigated it.

So I supposed I rather felt like I had to finish it, coupled with the fact that I could not simply abandon Ava and Kiwi and Osceola without finding out where Karen Russell left them.

In a way that made the entry into the story a little harder and a little easier for me - this was a book my mother wanted me to read and had spoken to me about before she became ill and later passed away. Following Ava's feelings on her own mother's time in the hospital and later death were a poignantly strange entry to her mindset that perhaps made it harder for me to countenance her later choices, after sinking into her so well early on.

There were moments in this book that were intriguing, and certainly the premise of the family that live at and run Swamplandia! is in itself intriguing - particularly for someone like me, perhaps. (I have worked at a zoo and a wildlife park; the idea of it being your family's home, life, legacy is fascinating.)

There were far more moments in this book that, all credit to Russell as an author, made me genuinely gut-wrenchingly disgusted or ill. I am not entirely sure if they were supposed to, some of them, but I definitely had those feelings. (One of the reasons I really wanted to put this book down.)

Reading this book, and the 'adventures' of the teenagers in it, left me feeling like I was halfway between a young adult, or juvenile, book - adventures that should end poorly, but never quite go as badly as they could - and an adult book - adventures that can end as badly as it is possible to go.

It felt almost as though Russell didn't know which the story was - which feeling also came into play, for me, in several other of the sub-plots throughout the novel.

I will probably never pick this book up again, and at this point . . . despite Russell's few moments that touched me in the story, I'm not even sure I'm glad I picked it up to begin with.

This is not an uplifting book - that in itself doesn't bother me. Some of the most incredible books I've ever read are horrendously depressing.

Something about this story, however . . . I can't put my finger on it, but it is not a feeling that leaves me in a good place, mentally.

The novel was interesting, at the least, and the writing was not poor - the indecision I sensed is almost certainly a stylistic issue, and might not bother some readers - but it wasn't my cup of tea. ( )

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.
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Eh,

I really wanted to like this, but I found it to be annoying quirky, moreso than even Miranda July.
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