Swamplandia!

I finished this book a few weeks ago and I wanted to write something about it here, but I'm finding it strangely difficult to write anything coherent expressing how I feel about it. I had a very emotional response to it, to put it in the simplest terms. There is a whimsy in Karen Russell's writing that is deceptive. There is a darkness in her writing that is surprising. Both of which make her the perfect voice for a 13 year old girl. I started to write a long post about the emotional respose I had to it and it turned into a rambling post about how weird and difficult it was for me to grow up in a small town in Florida (where the book takes place). I figured people probably don't want to read my memiors in blog form so I ended up deleting the whole thing. Every page of Swamplandia! brought up memories, and not just "remember when..." memories, the kind of visceral memories you form without knowing when you're a kid, the kind of memories you feel. It was a good read, but a difficult good.