Swamplandia!

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Turtleback, Jul 26, 2011 - Fiction - 400 pages
Nominated for the Orange Prize
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family's island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness. As Ava sets out on a mission through the magical swamps to save them all, we are drawn into a lush and bravely imagined debut that takes us to the shimmering edge of reality.

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About the author (2011)

Karen Russell was born in Miami, Florida in 1981. Karen is the author of Swamplandia!, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize and was also included in the New York Times' "10 Best Books of 2011." She was named a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" young writer honoree and received the Bard Fiction Prize in 2011 for her first book of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Russell received a B.A. from Northwestern University and MFA program from Columbia University.

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