Awesome!

Is what I say about Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.

I really liked it, although I started it around 6pm on a Sunday night when I found out I had gotten into a book club that would be discussing it at 7pm on the upcoming Tuesday night, so I basically skimmed the last chapter sitting at the bar at 6:45 on Tuesday.

Too distracted trying to get out of here (Friday!) to say that much about it, but basically I thought the two main characters were really strong, all were well developed, and I appreciated that the story was spun out at its own pace, and not for the reader's benefit. I thought the beginning was way too jam-packed with adjectives - and that's coming from ME - but either Russell hit her stride, got more confident & streamlined, or I just stopped noticing. I was certainly engrossed in the story; Russell switches back and forth between her main character, a young girl, and the secondary (in my opinion) main character, the girl's somewhat older brother, and I think it's a testament to the book that as I was reading each character's chapter (the pov switched back and forth), I was torn between wanting to really sink in to the story and hand, but also race ahead to see what was going on in the other storyline, that we had just left.

It's also a HUGE thing that when the presumably (or so I thought, at least) child-molester character starts hanging around our young female protagonist, as much as I was shouting "RUN AWAY!" there was also part of me that was like "Sh*t - I know this is bad, but I really want to know where the author's going to go with this."

A lot of research, particularly into Florida's settlement history, clearly went into this, which I appreciated, although I think Russell did occasionally fall into the trap of "I found this fact, it's so cool, I need to use it!" when less might have been more.

The setting was fantastic, though, a family living on an isolated island (at a somewhat, and clearly deliberately, vague time) where they run an alligator theme park and pose (more or less) as an "Indian tribe" (kind of). Just very unique, and rich - much like the landscape she describes in loving and sometimes overwhelming (but not really) detail.

Certainly got a ton of - amazing - press when it came out, and it had been on my list to read forever, near the top always but never quite there, so I was really happy to have an excuse to finally make myself skip it to the front of the line.