After reading Russell’s The Antidote recently and being enchanted with it, I decided to read some of her older works, beginning with Swamplandia!, her debut novel.

Swamplandia! is a family-run tourist attraction on an island in the Everglades. The cast of characters includes grandfather Sawtooth, father Big Chief,  mother Hilola, seventeen-year-old big brother Kiwi, sixteen-year-old big sister Osceola, and thirteen-year-old Ava who is being trained as a gator-wrestler. When the mother, the headliner who dives into a pool of alligators, dies, the family is thrown in disarray. The business suffers substantial losses, and its very existence is threatened. Sawtooth is suffering from dementia and is put away. The father runs off to the mainland on some secret journey. Kiwi also goes to the mainland to earn money to pay down the attraction’s debts; but with a minimum wage job, he finds survival difficult, much less making payments to the bank. Osceola is obsessed with spiritualism (on top of being psychotic and seeing ghosts). Eventually she elopes with the ghost of Louis Thanksgiving, who worked on a Depression-era dredging barge before dying on it. Left alone on the island, Ava determines that she must save her sister who is driving the barge into Hell to marry Louis. Assisted by a bizarre man, the Bird Man, Ava  embarks on a journey through the mangrove wilderness.

Russell blends Greek myths (Charon piloting the boat into Hell, a mortal following a dead lover into Hell, and a young mortal trying to enter Hell and return to the real world), Everglades folklore, and history (such as the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane which killed World War I veterans working on a relief project). Russell’s prose is gorgeous. Her dialogue sparkles. Her knowledge of the swamp’s flora and fauna is impressive. My only complaint is that the ending seems too convenient and contrived.

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Swamplandia! (Knopf Doubleday, February 1, 2011) is available through:

Your local independent bookseller      |    Amazon    |    Barnes & Noble

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You can read my review of The Antidote here.

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