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S'està carregant… Swamplandia!de Karen Russell
  
Top Five Books of 2013 (257) » 27 més Books Read in 2014 (250) Female Author (615) Unreliable Narrators (104) Books Set in Florida (17) Female Protagonist (691) Best Family Stories (215)
A novel I wasn't sure I'd like, but I did. (  ) mykl-s | Aug 13, 2023 |  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 (  ) beckyrenner | Aug 3, 2023 | 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. ( ) blueskygreentrees | Jul 30, 2023 | 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... ( ) kevinkevbo | Jul 14, 2023 | Not bad. There's a lot of 'almost' in this book. Does the pace of character development match the pace of the plot line? Almost. Does the language and imagery keep its edge throughout? Almost. Is the inclusion of a trauma justified in the end? Almost. One more critical edit and I might have loved this. Worth reading for the delight of characters and setting, and a few very thoughtful moments. ( ) Kiramke | Jun 27, 2023 |
 Karen Russell, one of the New Yorker's 20 best writers under 40, is certainly very talented. She received wide acclaim for her first book, the story collection St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which first introduced the Bigtree family in the story "Ava Wrestles the Alligator". This novel has already received great reviews in the US, and it's easy to see why. Many of her descriptions are quite dazzling. On the retirement boat, "The seniors got issued these pastel pajamas that made them look like Easter eggs in wheelchairs." In the swamp, "two black branches spooned out of the same wide trunk. They looked like mirror images, these branches, thin and papery and perfectly cupped, blue sky shining between them, and an egret sat on the scooped air like a pearl earring." Over 300 pages, the density of the prose can become a bit exhausting, however, and Russell's ability to describe everything in minute and quirky detail is sometimes overwhelming.  So Ms. Russell has quite a way with words. She begins with the alligators’ “icicle overbites,” the visiting tourists who “moved sproingingly from buttock to buttock in the stands,” the wild climate (“Our swamp got blown to green bits and reassembled, daily, hourly”), and the Bigtrees’ various thoughts about the theme park’s gators, or Seths. Leaving the origin of that nickname as one of this novel’s endless lovely surprises, let’s just say that Chief Bigtree holds the reptiles in low regard. “That creature is pure appetite in a leather case,” he warns Ava. But when Ava tenderly adopts a newborn bright-red creature as her secret pet, she says, “the rise and fall of the Seth’s belly scales could hypnotize me for an hour at a stretch.” A debut novel from Russell (stories: St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, 2006) about female alligator wrestlers, ghost boyfriends and a theme park called World of Darkness. PremisDistinctionsNotable Lists
Twelve year old Ava must travel into the Underworld part of the smamp in order to save her family's dynasty of Bigtree alligator wresting. This novel takes us 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 no. 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 as well as her own grief. Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, the author has written a novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — S'està carregant…GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana: (3.35)
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General Discussion Thread *Group Read* of SWAMPLANDIA
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