Swamplandia!
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Narrated by:
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Arielle Sitrick
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David Ackroyd
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By:
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Karen Russell
About this listen
From the celebrated 29-year-old author of the everywhere-heralded short-story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (“How I wish these were my own words, instead of the breakneck demon writer Karen Russell’s...Run for your life. This girl is on fire” - Los Angeles Times Book Review) comes a blazingly original debut novel that takes us back to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine.
The Bigtree alligator-wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, formerly number one in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava’s father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified 13, to manage 98 gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief.
Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family’s struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work from a vibrant new voice in fiction.
©2011 Karen Russell (P)2011 Random HouseListeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
The Bigtree clan is a family in crisis. The mother, Hiola, has passed away and she was not only the main gator wrestler and star attraction at the Swamplandia theme park, but the glue that held the family together. Now on the verge of losing their beloved home, the Bigtrees find they are ill-prepared to deal with the real world into which they've been thrust. Each member of the family leaves their sheltered enclave convinced they can somehow turn things around. Yet do they leave Swamplandia more to save it or to escape it?
The narration duties here are divided in some very interesting ways. Actress/writer Arielle Sitrick plays the main character of young Ava in the chapters focusing mainly on Swamplandia. David Ackroyd takes on the role of Kiwi, the older teenage son, with his chapters being told mainly from a rival theme park, a place that's a bizarro alternative universe version of his previous home. The two narrators see things quite differently. Sitrick voices Ava as the winsome innocent and the mystic heart of a Swamplandia where anything is possible; however, did the nostalgic world she remembers ever really exist? Ackroyd plays Kiwi as the somewhat naive yet most practical member of the family. He has big plans and learns quickly, but finds things are not quite so easy out in the real world.
Karen Russell's Swamplandia is an amusing and well crafted piece that's a bit Florida gothic and a bit magical realism. Will Ava's rare red gator save the day? Maybe Kiwi with his big plans and Forrest Gump-like luck will come through after all? Will younger sister Osceola ever marry her long-dead ghost boyfriend? Then again, perhaps the various family pipe dreams are destined to fail, as perhaps is Swamplandia? In the end the characters and the listener have to question just what a happy ending for this quirky family would even look like. That's the journey that Russell takes you on with Swamplandia, and it's a colorful, original trip well worth taking. Cleo Creech
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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Sometimes a Great Notion
- By: Ken Kesey
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 30 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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Sometimes a Great Novel Pops up out of Nowhere
- By Mr. Eyuz on 06-07-19
By: Ken Kesey
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A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: T. C. Boyle
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.
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Mixed Bag
- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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Make Something Up
- Stories You Can't Unread
- By: Chuck Palahniuk
- Narrated by: Chuck Palahniuk, Scott Sowers, Rich Orlow, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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For years Chuck Palahniuk has reserved his best storytelling for his readings, often choosing to read a new short story instead of whatever novel he is supposed to be promoting. Make Something Up compiles these previously unpublished tales for the very first time, plus the Byliner social media insta-classic "Phoenix" and Palahniuk's most notable pieces from Playboy.
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Plenty of shock, just not enough Palahniuk awe
- By Darwin8u on 06-10-15
By: Chuck Palahniuk
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The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 4
- By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, Stephen King, Peter Straub
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Rebecca Mitchell, Michael Healy, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.
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Only a few decent stories in this bunch.
- By Jerry on 12-06-14
By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, and others
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Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
- A Novel
- By: Ruth Emmie Lang
- Narrated by: Piper Goodeve, Peter Berkrot, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Stopping a tornado was the first of many strange events that seem to follow Weylyn from town to town, although he doesn't like to take credit. As amazing as these powers may appear, they tend to manifest themselves at inopportune times and places. From freak storms to trees that appear to grow over night, Weylyn's unique abilities are a curiosity at best and at worst, a danger to himself and the woman he loves. But Mary doesn't care.
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An Accidental Wonder!
- By Brandy Pendergrass on 02-16-18
By: Ruth Emmie Lang
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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The Mosquito Coast
- By: Paul Theroux
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.
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Dreadful in every sense of the word.
- By Joan on 07-12-15
By: Paul Theroux
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The Necromancer's House
- By: Christopher Buehlman
- Narrated by: Todd Haberkorn
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is a handsome, stylish nonconformist with wry wit, a classic Mustang, and a massive library. He is also a recovering alcoholic and a practicing warlock, able to speak with the dead through film. His house is a maze of sorcerous booby traps and escape tunnels, as yours might be if you were sitting on a treasury of Russian magic stolen from the Soviet Union thirty years ago.
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Finally - Magic / Fantasy Novel for adults.
- By David on 04-23-14
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Mannheim Rex
- By: Robert Pobi
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 14 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Recently widowered and grieving, Gavin flees New York City for the quiet of the country. His new home on Lake Caldasac has surprisingly few visitors, and the author soon learns why: a suspiciously high number of people have gone missing in the small town. The deaths have all been ruled accidents, but Finn Horn, a handicapped boy obsessed with fishing, knows the truth. There’s a monster in the lake. And it wants to feed.
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Interesting and fun
- By Bob on 01-14-13
By: Robert Pobi
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The New Moon's Arms
- By: Nalo Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Gin Hammond
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Calamity is confronting two big transitions: the death of her beloved father and the beginning of menopause, a physical shift that has rekindled her gift for finding lost things. Suddenly, she is getting hot flashes that seem to forge objects out of thin air, most notably a four-year old boy. As Calamity takes the child into her care, she discovers that all is not as it seems. Then, Calamity must reawaken to the mysteries surrounding her own childhood and the early disappearance of her mother.
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What a joy
- By newmoon on 07-05-19
By: Nalo Hopkinson
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Sister Mine
- By: Nalo Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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"We'd had to be cut free of our mother's womb. Abby and I were fused, you see. But here's the real kicker; Abby had the magic, I didn't." Now adults, Makeda and Abby still share their childhood home. The surgery to separate the two girls left Makeda with what feels like an even worse deformity: no mojo. The daughters of a celestial demigod and a human woman, Makeda and Abby were raised by their magical father. Today, Makeda has decided it's high time to move out and make her own life.
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Narrator saves this story
- By Denis A. on 03-21-14
By: Nalo Hopkinson
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Battleborn
- By: Claire Vaye Watkins
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Morgan Hallett, Laura Knight Keating, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.
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Wonderful magnificent stories beautifully told
- By Pedro Ramirez on 12-03-15
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
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Hour of the Bees
- By: Lindsay Eagar
- Narrated by: Almarie Guerra
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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While her friends are spending their summers having pool parties and sleepovers, twelve-year-old Carolina - Carol - is spending hers in the middle of the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move the grandfather she's never met into a home for people with dementia. At first, Carol avoids prickly Grandpa Serge.
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Love it!
- By Lucy Manetti on 04-10-17
By: Lindsay Eagar
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Beauty Queens
- By: Libba Bray
- Narrated by: Libba Bray
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The 50 contestants in the Miss Teen Dream pageant thought this was going to be a fun trip to the beach, where they could parade in their state-appropriate costumes and compete in front of the cameras. But sadly, their airplane had another idea, crashing on a desert island and leaving the survivors stranded with little food, little water, and practically no eyeliner. What’s a beauty queen to do? Continue to practice for the talent portion of the program - or wrestle snakes to the ground? Get a perfect tan - or learn to run wild? And what should happen when the sexy pirates show up?
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No one left unscathed
- By Vanessa on 09-12-11
By: Libba Bray
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What listeners say about Swamplandia!
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- H. Casteel
- 09-12-15
Interesting. Not my favorite
It kept me interested throughout, but just wasn't the outcome I hoped so strongly for. Hard to listen to at some points, but features real life struggles for many people/families.
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- Erin
- 11-14-19
Beautiful stage, not much else
The first half of this book is so delicious. Sadly, all the intricate and lovely world building does not seem to go anywhere.
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- Aun Aprendiendo
- 08-07-12
Spoiled by bad reading.
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
This book was hard to stick with. The sentences were read in a repetetive dropping cadence that did nothing for the rich vocabulary of the writing. The young girl reading had no training or editing, mispronouncing many words.
What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?
The story was interesting, the descriptions were unusual and conveyed emotion and intelligence. Wish I could have read it instead.
Was Swamplandia! worth the listening time?
Had to do it to fulfill a Book Club requirement while traveling. It was vexing.
Any additional comments?
As others have stated, I'm annoyed with Audible, and the book publishers,for this poor effort.
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- debbie tinnirello
- 04-10-18
Tough
I enjoyed so many aspects about this book but it was a tough tough tough story.
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- Dude
- 03-23-13
Much more than gator wrestling
What did you love best about Swamplandia!?
The prose was crisp, the characters believable. I enjoyed the exotic location in the Florida swamps and the unique perspective offered by the characters with little exposure to the modern/outside world.
What did you like best about this story?
The perspectives of the teenage boy and how he adapted to the difficult situation.
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- Skooff
- 09-10-12
Read by a whiny little girl
Would you try another book from Karen Russell and/or Arielle Sitrick and David Ackroyd ?
I tried listening to this book, but couldn't stand listening to the whiny girl that read it. I finally read it (on my Kindle), and absolutely loved the book!
What was one of the most memorable moments of Swamplandia!?
Ava Bigtree's Huck-Finn-like trip through the world of the swamp in Florida. But really, the most memorable part of the book was not a "moment" but the overall use of language, which is amazing! It is colorful, inventive, clever, evocative, fun and beautiful!
How could the performance have been better?
Well, it could have been a different reader for Ava.
Did Swamplandia! inspire you to do anything?
Stay away from Florida!
Any additional comments?
I truly think this is one of the best books I've ever read. "Read" not "listened to."
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- Patricia
- 03-23-13
Quirky and Wonderful!
This book was on a lot of "Best Books Of the Year" lists, so I thought I would give it a try and I was not disappointed. The first time I tried to listen I cut it off after a half hour, but stick with it!!! It is a quirky, character driven, wonderful book and you will love the narrator. Best Buy!
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- Jennifer
- 11-09-14
Great Storytelling
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes, absolutely. A well-crafted, expertly written coming of age story.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Swamplandia!?
Like all good writing, there isn't just one pivotal scene, but nuggets throughout that strike you.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes.
Any additional comments?
If you enjoy just a great story with good writing, this is worth checking out.
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- A. Margolis
- 10-14-12
Unexpectedly good!
Would you listen to Swamplandia! again? Why?
No - I have a good memory and do not usually reread (or relisten) to books. But, if I did, I would listen to Swamplandia again.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Swamplandia!?
I don't think the memorable moments, for me, were as much about the story as about the language. Karen Russell is able to "turn a phrase." I especially thought the things she said about what children feel about a lost mother were beautiful and rang true..
Have you listened to any of Arielle Sitrick and David Ackroyd ’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
No
If you could rename Swamplandia!, what would you call it?
I like the name.
Any additional comments?
Beautifully written book. I did not expect to like it as much as I did given the topic, but it was engrossing and I could not stop listening.
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Overall
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- Barbara
- 04-01-14
Worst performance Ever
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
I could not get past this narrator's voice. She sounds like a high schooler and not in a good way. Her diction is terrible. Her voice is so nasal it gave me a headache. I am so disappointed they would ever choose someone so inept to narrate.
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