Back in my totally middle class 70's childhood, my family used to go camping down in Florida and in various other places where strange roadside attractions loomed. I always wondered about the families that ran those reptile zoos or collections of plaster dinosaurs or bizarre ersatz "Native American" teepee huts. My dad was always too cheap to take us to any of the really good attractions, like Disney world or 6 Flags or anything like that, so our days were spent in places where a disenchanted alligator would yawn at us and we would look, frantically, in the gifte shoppes in the hope of finding something to make our visits worthwhile. Of course, my dad would never buy us anything that we asked for, so most of the time was spent in trying to indicate wants without actually saying them, but that's another story.
Swamplandia is a totally perfect rendition of what I always imagined those families to be like. I wallowed in this book. I felt the mosquitoes, the heat, the despair of living on not enough money and trying to be a star. I could see the curling-up posters on the wall, the postcards that were printed slightly off so the red poked out from behind the picture a bit.
It's not a really cheerful book. Things go bad and then things get worse and so on, but the characters seem to just take most of it in stride and succeed in their own way, nonetheless. One doesn't get the same emotional drenching as one would, say, in a Joy Fielding novel about the same situation. The floating along-ness goes with the pace of the book. Emotions aren't plumbed to their very depths - when something really bad happens, it's just described, and we move on. It's not less horrible for that - it instead speaks to the expectations of this family. They survive because they don't hope for better. As Mary Engelbreit's brightly cheerful poster says, "Life is just so daily!" And yet. Despite their calmness, I found myself rooting for the whole family throughout the book, wishing them well. Heck, I'd go to Swamplandia myself, just to see the swimming act... ( )

A novel I wasn't sure I'd like, but I did. ( )

I live-tweeted my reading of part of this book (because I'm hunkered down for Hurricane Irma but thankfully I still have power). For a more extensive version of my thoughts on Swamplandia!, you can read the series of tweets.

In the end, I thought that Swamplandia! was a novel that really should have been a few strong short stories instead.

There was a lot to like about the book. I especially enjoyed the specificity Russell used when she talked about ecology, flora and fauna, and Florida history. Those are some of my main areas of writing and research, and I'm a real stickler about them. So to impress me on that front is a huge deal.

What got in the way of me enjoying the book more was, as Karen Auvinen put it on twitter, Swamplandia! "gets confused about what kind of book it wants to be."

There's a dissociation between the tone and diction of the narration from the setting and the events of the story. It's like the narrator is a talking head floating over all of it. She isn't part of the world. She doesn't seem to belong there. Kiwi's sections are different. I honestly really did like his first section in The Underworld.

It's a novel by a short story writer, much too episodic and without a strong enough through line.

In the end, Swamplandia! wasn't terrible, but it didn't really come through for me. It was too messy, too indecisive. It was a book with a lot of potential that tried to be too many kinds of books at once. If it had done a few of those things well and nixed the rest, this would have been a really stellar book. Instead, the indecision made it just "okay" for me. 3.5 stars ( )

The author could have cut out about half of the description of the swamps during Ava's search; it's like filling in a really detailed background when all the audience wants is the portrait of Mona Lisa. Also, the ending left me unfulfilled. It seems like the author just ran out of steam and cut off the story without giving a good explanation for it all, or any sense of how the characters felt about their experiences.

Countering these negatives is the main positive: the characters. I really was interested in them, and related in my own ways with each of their personal dramas. Even the times when I was like, "Come on! Get your head out of your ass!" I still understood a little why they could not, in fact, get their heads out of their asses. ( )

Swaplandia is an interesting story of three siblings. A boy and two girls. The boy is a practical down to earth type but the girls both have vivid imaginations and see things in a different kind of way. So much so, that they believe in ghost. And what makes the story really interesting is that the author makes us want to believe right along with the girls. Readers of this book will ask them selves " Am I reading a ghost story here, or the story of two delusional misguided young girls. I wont spoil the book by revealing the answer. I'll let you find out for yourself... ( )