"Swamplandia!" is a Weird Mix of Murky Lives
A review by Mike Fischer
Writer Karen Russell is on record stating that, much as she loves reading realist fiction, she couldn't "write a moving tale about a family of struggling car salesmen in Detroit," even if "somebody held a gun to my head." "But a family of alligator wrestlers in a mythic swamp? That," she continued, "I can do." Now she has, in Swamplandia!, a weird and wonderfully inventive first novel that also happens to be a moving, very real tale about a struggling family. The Bigtrees aren't car salesmen from Detroit, but they're facing foreclosure on their isolated island home in Florida's Everglades once 36-year-old Hilola Bigtree succumbs to ovarian cancer. She leaves behind a dazed husband and three teenagers: a boy named Kiwi and two girls, Osceola and 13-year-old Ava. Back when customers demanded less because their imaginations did more, Hilola had been the star of the Bigtrees' alligator wrestling show held in Swamplandia!, their 100-acre throwback to carnivals from a distant ...
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Previously Reviewed by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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Evening Is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan
 First novelists often get missed in the cacophony of new books from established or popular writers. And so it was with Preeta Samarasan, a Malayasian native and a recent graduate of the University of Michigan whose sweeping novel about a Tamil family in a changing Malaysia moved quietly along book...
The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own. by David Carr
 While cementing his life as a substance abuser in Minneapolis during his teen years, David Carr crossed the state line to enroll at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.
"My crowning achievement came early," Carr writes. "As a freshman, I won the beer-chugging contest, drinking five 12-ounce...
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