Swamplandia! Takes You Inside a Failing Gator Park in the Everglades

Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! is set on a fictional island in the Ten Thousand Islands off Florida’s southwest coast, where the Bigtree family runs a failing alligator-wrestling theme park. When the family matriarch dies, everything unravels: the father disappears on a mysterious mainland trip, the oldest son defects to a rival amusement park called the World of Darkness, and the oldest daughter becomes obsessed with ghosts. That leaves 13-year-old Ava to hold it all together.

What makes this novel worth your time is Russell’s Everglades. The Ten Thousand Islands come alive as a character of their own: mangrove tunnels, peat bogs, sawgrass prairies, and shell mounds left by ancient peoples. Ava’s journey through this labyrinth to find her sister is equal parts adventure story and fever dream. Russell grew up in Miami and knows this landscape in her bones.

Swamplandia! was a New York Times bestseller, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of the Times‘ ten best books of 2011. Russell has since won a MacArthur Fellowship. If you want a Florida novel that captures the state’s beautiful strangeness without the beach-read clichés, start here.