prateekgupta13

This was my first experience with Karen Russell, but it won't be my last; she has delicious talent. Russell has invented 12 year old Ava Bigtree, alligator wrestler, and her family - I mean, tribe, of Bigtrees, who live on an island in the swamplands of Florida, Swamplandia!, which is a tourist attraction featuring "Seths" (alligators); it tells the story of the family's unravelling in the wake of Ava's mother's premature death from cancer. I don't want to give away the plot, but suffice to say that this is gothic fiction for the 21st century, and heartbreakingly beautiful in its achievement. She successfully creates a world, characters, and a storyline that are truly, in every sense of the word, fantastic. She indicates her debt to Katherine Dunne in the acknowledgements, and it makes perfect sense: the book is delicate and horrifying. It's also funny, rich, suspenseful...I was surprised and surprised and surprised at the layers and depth of this book; it literally just kept getting better and better. That said, if you're looking for a simple happy ending, this book is not for you. Room for improvement: There was one point in the book where the voice of the main character, Ava Bigtree, markedly changes. At first, I was taken aback and even somewhat irritated, finding the shift incongruous with the Ava I'd known up to that point; it winds up making sense, I guess, by the ending, and acts as a guide for the reader, but it still really irritated me; it was abrupt and disconcerting. And I have to admit that this book did not close with a click; it closed with a slam, and I didn't like that at all. It's as if Russell, reaching the denouement, almost didn't know what to do once she got there. Part of me wishes I'd lost the book 25 pages (I think? It was an ebook) before it ended, because then I would have thought it was the best book I'd read in a long time.

2022-09-04 11:36