Swamplandia! Review

This week's novel is Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.  My critique group was working their way through this one until we got a bit off topic, and I went ahead and finished it on my own.

Ava's family owns Swamplandia! an alligator wrestling theme park in the Everglades.  When Ava's mom (and star of the show) dies and The World of Darkness theme park opens on the mainland, they lose all their tourists and the family falls apart.  Ava's brother, Kiwi, defects to work at The World of Darkness.  Her dad, the Chief, leaves to find investors on the mainland.  And her sister, Osceola, has started "dating ghosts" and decides to elope with one of them, vanishing into the swamp and leaving twelve-year-old Ava alone with the alligators.

The descriptions are thick.  They're dense and chlosterphobic, doubling down on the swamp's oppressive atmosphere.  It's definitely purposeful, as Russell's descriptions on The World of Darkness are much thinner, which works for The World of Darkness, giving it a soulless, empty feel just through contrast.

Speaking of which, the World of Darkness is amazing.  It is so weird, but so easy to visualize since to leaps off of what you know of typical amusement parks.  You know at amusement parks that trash accumulated at the corners, in the crannies, and here those crannies are between the molars of the Leviathan, that visitors enter and then ride through it's digestive system on a huge waterslide that ends in a wave pool dyed red, which is an inconvenience for the lifeguards.  But the World of Darkness isn't all that concerned with safety.  Russell takes bizarre ideas, but grounds them in reality so well that they seem almost reasonable.

I loved Ava.  Her love for the swamp and the alligators and her family came through in the details she used to describe them, the little things she remembered.  She was spunky with child logic that worked so well she almost made me believe as she did that the underworld was a real place in the swamp and she could go there to save her sister.  Almost.  Her nievite worked for me.  I knew she was making bad choices, but I could see exactly why she was making them and her poor choices seemed to stem mostly from her being a child.  On the other hand, Kiwi (whose adventures are covered in alternating chapters with Ava's) makes bad decisions that are more "be embarrassingly socially awkward" than "travel into the swamp with a stranger dressed like a bird." With Kiwi, it came out more clearly that he was not properly socialized, which could be Ava's problem, but he's old enough that it feels like he should know better.  And he doesn't.  It led me to some painful secondhand embarrassment and was not nearly as enjoyable as Ava's pluckiness.  Maybe it was that his challenges had lower stakes and I forgave him less because he had it easier.  Maybe it was that his missteps were relatable in a completely different way, one that reminds me of being socially awkward, which is not something I need to be reminded of.

***

Next week: Mermaids in Paradise, the Pulitzer prize finalist about mermaids by Lydia Millet.