The novel is set in the Ten Thousand Islands, off the southwest coast of Florida, it tells the story of the Bigtree family of alligator wrestlers who live in Swamplandia!
In light of plummeting attendance and mounting debts, The Chief, Hilola's husband, unveils a plan for improvements to Swamplandia!, but his son Kiwi is skeptical and suggests selling the park altogether.
Meanwhile, Kiwi continues to clash with his father over selling Swamplandia!, and he eventually decides to leave the island in an attempt to save the theme park on his own.
He finds minimum-wage employment as a janitor at The World of Darkness and eventually befriends his coworker Vijay, who helps him learn to adopt normal teenage vernacular and mannerisms.
When he rescues a teenage girl, Kiwi becomes a local hero and, as a result, The World of Darkness sends him to train as an airplane pilot.
One day, while clearing melaleuca plants on a remote part of the island, Ava and Osceola discover a decaying dredge boat offshore.
Osceola reveals what she has learned: In the 1930s a young man named Louis Thanksgiving ran away from the abuse of his adoptive family on a farm in the midwest.
Kiwi continues his pilot training and, on his first flight, notices Osceola, wearing the remains of their mother's wedding dress, stranded in the swamp.
Thirteen year-old Ava, the youngest Bigtree child, is the first-person narrator of much of the novel (the sections describing Kiwi's journey are told in the third person).
She possesses a rather kind and passive personality, and develops a passionate fascination with ghosts after she finds "The Spiritist's Telegraph" in a waterlogged library boat.
He has invented a tribal world for his family despite having no native Indian heritage, and is fiercely (and unjustifiably) optimistic about the future of Swamplandia!
Ten Thousand Islands is not merely alligator country, it is the uncanny river of grass, the haunting gloom in the ever-changing mangrove tunnels, peat bogs, endless sawgrass prairies, abandoned stilt houses and shell mounds left by primordial Native Americans.
Like the Seminoles who lost their leader, when Osceola was captured by deception, under a flag of truce, a century ago, Ava is similarly betrayed.
[3] Alternating between Ava's fantastic voyage in the swamp and Kiwi's struggle in his over-chilled dormitory room under The World of Darkness echos the inherent liminality of life in Florida, where land and water combine, weather and sea rise change the shapes of coasts, and the result of man-made canals and drainage projects are evident in historic droughts, invasive species and sink-holes.
Meanwhile, The Chief can barely hang onto a job promoting a tawdry sideshow of aging "beauties" in a casino, but the young and ambitious Kiwi adapts to mainland life, and rises to the status of airplane pilot, enabling him to rescue and reunite the family.
[2] Russell goes on to explain that this exclamation point reflects a "manufactured enthusiasm" that comes from the family having created the Bigtree wrestling tradition, whereas in the novel, Swamplandia!
Another feature of Russell's style noted by critics is the difference between Ava's (first person) and Kiwi's (third person) narrative: While Ava's narrative provides the fantastical and nightmarish backdrop to the novel, Kiwi's point of view is "all naïve practicality" according to Paul Di Filippo's review[6] and provides the more 'grounded' nightmares similar to those experienced in mundane day-to-day life.
"[8] According to Jane Ciabattari's review on NPR:[9] "Ava's voice, which shifts fluidly from preternatural wisdom to vulnerable cluelessness, rings true to her age.
Throughout the book, she dwells lovingly on the endangered beauties of South Florida's Ten Thousand Islands, from the 'glacial spires of a long oyster bed' to a 'sky-flood' of moths with sapphire-tipped wings."
[10] A New York Times critic summarizes Russell's unique style by stating that she has "honed her elegant verbal wit and fused it with the nightmare logic that makes Swamplandia!
Grief is a very private affair for these characters, and each member of the Bigtree family is so focused on the ghosts of the past, and their doomed, miraculous visions of the future, that they keep missing one another in the present.
: "I envisioned Hilola Bigtree's death like a pool ball break, this traumatic event happens and they all spiral off into their own pocket.
[9] Di Filippo continues with this assessment, describing the novel as an "heir to a Southern tradition of tall tales, thick descriptions, deep backstories and contrary cusses as anti-heroes.
The contrast between the macabre and disturbing imagery and the comic interludes has divided critics: Jonathan Gibbs of The Telegraph noted that: "It's a set-up as wacky as it is grim, and for a while Russell seems content to serve up a hyperactive comedy of despair, a sort of swampy Southern Gothic high on too much cheap cola.