Swamplandia! (Russell)

Swamplandia!
Karen Russell, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307263995

In Brief 
From the celebrated twenty-nine-year-old author of the everywhere-heralded short-story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves comes a blazingly original debut novel that takes us 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. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author
• Birth—July 10, 1981
• Where—Miami, Florida, USA
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University
   M.F.A. Columbia University
• Awards & Recognition—New Yorker's 20 Under 40;
   Granta's Best Young American Novelists; National Book
   Foundation's 5 Under 35; Mary Ellen von der Heyden
   Berlin Prize
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Karen Russell attended Northwestern University, where she earned her B.A. in 2003. She is a 2006 graduate of the Columbia University MFA program.

She was Margaret Bundy Scott Visiting Professor of English at Williams College.

Her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zoetrope.

She was named a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" young writer honoree at a November 2009 ceremony, for her first book of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Her second book, first novel Swamplandia! (2011), about a shabby amusement park set in the Everglades, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and long-listed for the Orange Prize.

In 2013, she released another short story collection to excellent reviews: Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

She is the recipient of the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize and was a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Spring 2012. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

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Critics Say . . .
Ms. Russell knows how to use bizarre ingredients to absolutely irresistible effect…For all its gorgeously eerie omens …Swamplandia! stays rooted in the Bigtree family's emotional reality. Take away the wall-to-wall literary embellishments, and this is a recognizable story, if not a familiar one. But there's no need to take those embellishments away. They are an essential, immensely enjoyable part of this novel's strange allure, and they have been rendered with commanding expertise, right down to the most tangential details…The book's a marvel.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


Vividly worded, exuberant in characterization, the novel is a wild ride: Russell has style in spades…If Russell's style is a North American take on magical realism, then her commitment to life's nitty-gritties anchors the magic; we are more inclined to suspend disbelief at the moments that verge on the paranormal because she has turned Swamplandia! into a credible world..
Emma Donoghue - New York Times


Russell has perfected a tone of deadpan wit and imperiled innocence that I find deeply endearing…you never know when a riptide of tragedy might pull away the humor of Swamplandia! As in her short-story collection, [Russell's] charted out a strange estuary where heartbreak and comedy mingle to produce a fictional environment that seems semi-magical but emotionally true.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Few novelists debut with as much hearty recommendation as Russell, a New Yorker 20-under-40 whose cunning first novel germinates a seed planted in her much-loved collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. We return to Swamplandia!, the once-thriving Florida tourist attraction where the Bigtree clan—Ava, Ossie, Kiwi, and the Chief—wrestles alligators. After the death of mother Hilola—the park's star alligator wrestler—Ava, the youngest Bigtree, takes her place in the spotlight while her sister, Ossie, elopes with a ghostly man named Louis Thanksgiving, and brother Kiwi winds up sweeping floors at Swamplandia!'s competition. Worst of all is the disappearance of the Chief, spurring Ava to embark upon a rescue mission that will take her from the Gulf of Mexico to the gates of hell, occasionally assisted by an unlikely extended family that includes the geriatric Grandpa Sawtooth, the Bird Man, and a tiny red alligator with the potential to save the park. Russell's willingness to lend flesh and blood to her fanciful, fantastical creations gives this spry novel a potent punch and announces an enthralling new beginning for a quickly evolving young author.
Publishers Weekly


The Tamiami Trail, a two-lane road connecting the wealthy city of Naples with bustling, multicultural Miami, cuts through a river of grass known as the Florida Everglades. This wonderfully unique combination of wildwood hammock and cypress slough has been home to the mound-building Calusa, then the Seminoles, and now the quirkiest, most delightful group of all, the fictitious Bigtrees. A once-thriving destination for blue-haired tourists from the Midwest, Swamplandia boasted airboat rides and alligator wrestling until the death of the feature performer, matriarch Hilola Bigtree. The grieving chief fails to recognize that his kids are suffering, too. Osceola, the oldest daughter, communes with the dead. Kiwi, her brother, makes a pact with the devil, the Disney-esque attraction, World of Darkness, and precocious Ava secretly nurtures a rare red alligator, hoping to revive the family business. Like a kinder, gentler Carl Hiaasen, Russell manages to skewer all the Florida bad guys—Big Sugar, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Casino Gaming Commission—while writing a love song to paradise and innocence lost. Verdict: This wildly imaginative debut novel, coming on the heels of the short story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, delivers on Russell's status as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. A phantasmagorical tale of teens left on their own to battle their demons, mixed with a brief history of the Sunshine State, Russell's book will appeal to young adults as well as their folks. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
Library Journal


Ava Bigtree is experiencing some hard times in making it through her childhood. Her mother Hilola, a world-class alligator wrestler at the family tourist compound Swamplandia! (which Russell always writes with an exclamation point), died of cancer, so business has fallen off considerably. Perhaps even more significant, World of Darkness recently opened and started draining away customers from Swamplandia! Because the Bigtree family business was on an island off the coast of Florida, no one in the family had much experience with mainland life. Ava, who narrates roughly half the book, would like to follow in her mother's alligator-wrestling footsteps, but her age prevents her from reviving the business. Her brother Kiwi joins the forces of evil, as it were, by taking a job at World of Darkness—one of its big draws is the Leviathan, a ride in which tourists slide down a seemingly saliva-soaked tongue of a giant whale—but also by getting the education he lacked on the island. Kiwi hopes to send money home but finds after meeting all the exploitative fees charged by his boss that he has almost nothing left. Ava's sister Ossie (short for Osceola—she's named after the Florida Indian tribe) starts paying close attention to the results of a Ouija board, finds an old dredge in the swamps near her home, and goes off with the ghost of Louis Thanksgiving, who had died in the swamps years before. Meanwhile, the patriarch of the Bigtree clan, known as the Chief, abandons the whole sorry business and finds a job at a mainland casino. The narrative becomes a quest of sorts as Ava, accompanied by a bizarre character called the Bird Man, poles through the swamps in a mythic attempt to locate her sister. Throughout this search, Russell evokes archetypal journeys through underworlds and across the Styx. Quirky, outlandish fiction: To say it's offbeat is to seriously underestimate its weirdness.
Kirkus Reviews

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Book Club Discussion Questions 
1. Now that you’ve read the novel, go back and reread the epigraph. Why do you think Russell chose this quote?

2. Some of these characters first appeared in the story “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” in Russell’s collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Have you read that story? How does it compare to the novel?

3. “‘Tradition is as important, kids,’ Chief Bigtree liked to say, ‘as promotional materials are expensive.’” (page 5) Did the Chief show this in his actions? Which of the Bigtree tribe members paid the most respect to tradition?

4. How did Chief’s myth-making affect his children? How might things have been different if he’d been more truthful?

5. On page 28, Chief introduces his theory of Carnival Darwinism, which he thought would save Swamplandia! How might it have been successful? Why wasn’t it?

6. Where else does the notion of evolution come into play?

7. Belief—in Carnival Darwinism, in ghosts—plays a large role in the novel. What prompts Ossie’s beliefs? Ava’s? Where is the turning point in their belief systems?

8. Why do you think Ossie sees Louis and other ghosts, but never Hilola?

9. What does Ava’s red alligator represent? And the melaleuca trees?

10. Why do you think Russell interrupted the novel for the story of the Dredgeman’s Revelation? What exactly is the “revelation”?

11. There are biblical references throughout the book, especially in the World of Darkness sections. Why does Russell include them?

12. How do Kiwi’s actions affect his family? What do we learn via his sojourn on the mainland?

13. On page 146, the Bird Man tells Ava, “Nobody can get to hell without assistance, kid.” How does this compare to the quote from Dante that opens the chapter? What does it tell us about his character?

14. The three Bigtree children are innocent for their ages. Which one matures the most over the course of the novel?

15. The Bird Man calls the ending of the Dredgeman’s Revelation “a vanishing point.” (page 176) What does he mean by that?

16. Both the Bird Man and Vijay act as guides to a Bigtree sibling. How does each approach his role?

17. When Ava said “I love you” to the Bird Man on page 196, what did you expect to happen as a result?

18. On page 198, Ava recites a credo: “I believe the Bird Man knows a passage to the underworld. I believe that I am brave enough to do this. I have faith that we are going to rescue Ossie.” Was she right about any of this?

19. Did the Bird Man believe in the underworld, or did he have an ulterior motive all along?

20. How does Kiwi’s use of language change during the novel? What does it reflect?

21. Like the Dredgeman, several of the Bigtrees have revelations. Whose is the most surprising?

22. What is the significance of the Mama Weeds passage? What do we learn from it?

23. Why doesn’t Ava ever tell anyone what the Bird Man did?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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