Swamplandia! by Karen Russel
I have complicated feelings about this book. I was totally in love for the first few chapters. The language was rich, it transported me to a very different world, and yet it also felt a little disjointed. The first part felt like rich realism with people I’d never known existed, but somehow did, and then slowly I wasn’t sure if I was dealing with realism or magical realism anymore — there was a red alligator and a Bird Man and a strange adventure that had me going, “This can’t be safe? You can’t be safe?” and I just felt unsure of what the author wanted me to feel. And then it flipped between this strange island swampland and a mainland theme park and it just got a little bit kitschy for me. There were a lot of emotions I wanted dealt with that didn’t get hit. I felt like the book started off feeling thoughtful and intimate but later the characters felt somewhat flat and unchanging and the changes they did go through felt both too sweepingly large and too insignificant or unexamined to affect me on a personal level.
Worth reading, but it was too unsteady to live up to the hype for me. The first few chapters were magic, but the further I got into the book, the more irritated I got with it.
