“From the celebrated twenty-nine-year-old
author of the everywhere-heralded short-story collection St. Lucy’s Home for
Girls Raised by Wolves (“How I wish these were my own words, instead of the
breakneck demon writer Karen Russell’s . . . Run for your life. This girl is on
fire”—Los Angeles Times Book Review) comes a blazingly original debut novel
that takes us back to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us
to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine. The Bigtree alligator-wrestling
dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling
theme park, formerly #1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a
fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava’s
mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has
fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may
not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of
becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch
effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava’s father,
affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a
resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety-eight gators and the vast,
inscrutable landscape of her own grief. Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund
plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has
written an utterly singular novel about a family’s struggle to stay afloat in a
world that is inexorably sinking. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work
from a vibrant new voice in fiction.”
