![]() ![]() ![]() Ava Bigtree is growing up in her family’s theme park, Swamplandia, on an island off Florida. ![]() She knows about human sacrifice too - how the world eats up teenage girls, all their colorful hopes, their bravado soon boiled down to a taciturn obeisance. Russell knows about girlhood - how precious, how fragile, how tough a girl can be. Instead of a cowboy walking into the sunset, the hero is a 13-year-old girl. Russell’s writing is clear, rhythmic and dependable, even as her imagination runs wild. “Swamplandia!” the novel is magical realism, American style lush language, larger-than-life surrealism, a vertiginous line on every page between hopes, dreams and reality, a disorienting mirage of a book. Here it is again, but older, more mature, bigger in its novel form, like a knock-kneed teenager all grown up. “Swamplandia!” (under the name “Ava Wrestles the Alligator”) was a story in that collection, this novel a glimmer in the author’s eye. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” appeared on the horizon. This girl is on fire,” this reviewer wrote in these pages in 2006, when Karen Russell’s unnerving collection of stories, “St. ![]()
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