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Swamplandia!

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Swamplandia!

Written by: Karen Russell
Narrated by: Ariel Sitrick, David Ackroyd
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In the Florida Everglades, gator-park Swamplandia! is in trouble. Its star performer, the great beauty and champion alligator-wrestler Hilola Bigtree, has succumbed to cancer, and Ava, her resourceful but terrified 13-year-old daughter, is left in charge with her two siblings. But Ava's sister has embarked on a romantic relationship with a ghost, her brother has defected to a rival theme park, and her father is AWOL. And then a mysterious figure called Bird Man guides Ava into a perilous part of the swamp called the Underworld, promising he can save both her sister and the park...

Swamplandia! was longlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize and shortlisted for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

 Dark Fantasy Fairy Tales Fantasy Genre Fiction Magical Realism Women's Fiction
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Critic Reviews

Ms Russell has produces a rich and humid world of spirits and dreams, buzzing mosquitoes and prehistoric reptiles, baby-green cocoplums and marsh rabbits, and musty old tomes about heroes and spells. With Ava she has created a goofy and self-conscious girl who is young enough to hope that all darkness has an answering lightness. Inevitably she must learn otherwise. Swamplandia! is ultimately about the aching beauties of youth - the way life begins with such dumb sweetness, while the lessons that give it meaning lurk around each bend like terrifying gators in a mossy fragrant swamp
The tale of the two flyaway sisters proves lyrically powerful as it maps the enchanted but dangerous worlds that young minds can conjure to deal with grief (Stephen Amidon)
It's a wonderfully extravagant, eccentric story by a brilliant young writer with an amazing imagination (Kate Saunders)
I was looking forward to Swamplandia! and I wasn't disappointed. I found this novel beautifully written and very witty, yet often extremely sad too
The Miami-born writer renders the travails and delights of a...dreamlike world that leaves you intoxicated and slightly dishevelled
When you start reading a book, it's either sink or swim. With Karen Russell's Swamplandia, set in the alligator-infested Florida Everglades, we dove right in and never came up for air... Russell deftly dips into several story lines. And though she trolls some pretty dark waters (abandonment, consumerism, hungry swamp things), there's magic in discovering how everyone stays afloat
Russell details peculiarities about the alligators (known as Seths) to fascinating effect and skillfully satirizes the greed and fraudulence of entertainment corporations (Sunita Soliar)
The book certainly abounds in clever and striking images: alligators have "icicle overbites" and Hilola's children "watch her sink into her own face" as she dies of cancer (Anthony Cummins)
Russell's primeval imaginings and gutsy language lurk long in the memory (Emma Hagestadt)
The novel packs a genuine punch (Jonathan Gibbs)
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