Review of the Day: Swamplandia! By Karen Russell

Swamplandia! is a drama about the Bigtree family set at a down on its luck theme park on an island in the Florida Everglades named Swamplandia. Shortly before the story begins, the mother, Hilola, has died of cancer at the age of 36 which has started the family’s unraveling and the park’s decline. The story is narrated (most of the time) by 13 year old Ava. Her older brother Kiwi, 17, has moved to the mainland to work at a rival theme park and try, unsuccessfully, to earn money to save the park. Osceola or Ossie, 16, is obsessed with the occult and ghosts; she claims to be dating a ghost and wanders into the swampland to elope with her supposed ghost lover. Unsurprisingly, her plan does not work. The father or Big Chief has left the island and is absent for most of the book.

As Ava says:

My family, the Bigtree tribe of the Ten Thousand Islands, once lived on a hundred-acre island off the coast of southwest Florida, on the Gulf side of the Great Swamp. For many years, Swamplandia! was the Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café in the area…. Our park housed ninety-eight captive alligators in the Gator Pit(p. 6).

She sums up her family’s story like this:

The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn’t see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!’s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you’re short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell (p. 8).

The language in the book can be quite outstanding.

Lying to the Chief like this felt like freezing a lake into ice and skating quickly over it (p. 53). 

For you girls … (and in her silence you could hear at least a thousand verbs) (p. 107).

He had the extreme pallor and off-kilter good nature of a TV serial killer (p. 228).

Swamplandia seems to have some third act problems, seems to drag in places, and you have been warned about a sexual assault. However, I am glad I read the book.

kindle and LibroFM audiobook. 276 pgs. 14 March 2026