Swamplandia! - Softcover

"Brilliant, funny, original . . . also creepy and sinister . . . Karen Russell's Swamplandia! is every bit as good as her short stories promised it would be. This book will not leave my mind." (Stephen King)

"A wonderfully fertile novel by an unfairly talented writer." (Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland)

"A gorgeous and wrenching portrait of sibling love in all its helpless and furious and panicked indefatigability, and of one girl's determination to do what she can to hold what's left of her family together." (Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand Anyway)

"I can't recall the last time I came across a character who shines as brightly as Ava, or a first novel that made such a rich and lasting impression." (Carl Hiaasen)

"The novel is an experiment in how children’s minds comprehend loss, and Ava is a compelling guide...Russell’s strength is her use of language: each sentence is vividly rendered and the pages are as dense with images as the island is with life." (Fiona Wilson The Times)

The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline and Swamplandia!, their island home in the Florida Everglades and gator-wrestling theme park, is swiftly being encroached upon by a sophisticated competitor known as The World of Darkness. Ava, a resourceful but terrified twelve year old, must manage seventy gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief. Her mother, Swamplandia!'s legendary and beautiful star attraction, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her Grandpa Sawtooth has been sent to the mainland to an old folk's home; her brother has secretly defected to The World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep the family afloat; and her father, the Chief, is AWOL. To save them, Ava must journey on her own to a perilous part of the swamp called the Underworld, a harrowing odyssey from which she emerges a true heroine.

Swamplandia! is a dark and mythic story, bursting with energy and an unstoppable inventiveness, by a writer with an astonishingly original and exuberant imagination.