Swamplandia!
Feb 15, 2011
Author: Karen Russell
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Knopf (February 1, 2011)
ISBN-13: 978-0307263995
A very different, very interesting story. Ava and her family live in the swamps of Southern Florida running a homemade amusement park called... Swamplandia!
They lead very bohemian lives, pretending to be indigenous Indians to the area, spending the day swimming with alligators and getting their education from an old library boat wrecked on the shore.
Their family falls apart when mother, also the star of the shows, dies at the same time a new theme park moves in right across the water on the mainland. As their father travels to find new show ideas and their older brother runs away to work for the new theme park, Ava and her older sister, Ossie, are left to fend for themselves. All goes well, until Ossie, who is able to communicate with the dead, decides to run away into the swamp with her DEAD boyfriend (a dredgeman from the 30s who died when his boat blew up) to find the Otherworld and join him forever.
Ava, at the tender age of 13, is left to care for the alligators, provide for herself and go on a journey into the swamps to find and retrieve her sister before disaster strikes. She joins forces with the Bird Man who lives in the trees and claims he knows the doorway to the Otherworld. Together they start a journey to get to her sister before she marries a ghost and is never seen on this earth again - if what her sister says is true. This is when the book starts to get very spooky.
A scary tale of a dysfunctional family and the supernatural all coming together in the deepest swamps of Florida.
