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Knopf
February 2011
On Sale: February 1, 2011
336 pages
ISBN: 0307263991
EAN: 9780307263995
Hardcover
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Fiction Family Life
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.
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