SWAMPLANDIA! by Karen Russell - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK
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.
