Swamplandia!

Ava is a highly appealing narrator who has many talents beyond swimming with gators or taping their jaws shut. If protagonists (especially of first novels) typically bewail the mundanity of their small towns, the exotic is normal to Ava. Her first-person narration is not a transcription of a 13-year-old voice, but an evocation, in adult language, of a barely adolescent mind-set. This allows for a dazzling level of linguistic invention. Here Russell as Ava describes the dozen houses on pilings that make up the abandoned outpost of Stiltsville: “dawn light screaming through the doorways that hung on their hinges, the broken windows that birds could fly through, the plank lace, the cheesed metals.”

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The plot of “Swamplandia!” is nothing special — dysfunctional family pull apart, then pull together — but the execution is. This family, wrestling with their desires and demons, will neither succumb nor triumph, but survive in their scarred way, and will lodge in the memories of anyone lucky enough to read “Swamplandia!” If the gothic whimsy of this novel is sometimes too self-conscious, the pleasures it offers are unforced. As the wooden sign at the entrance to the Gator Pit says, “You Watchers in the First Four Rows Guaranteed to Get Wet!”