WIJFR: Swamplandia! (major spoilers)

[msmerymac]

And I don't really know how to feel.

I didn't mind the ending. Of course it was a literal deus ex machina - having an actual machine swoop down from the sky to save Ossie and Ava. And yet, it wasn't entirely happy, as they lose the park, which we knew was certain.

Some of the writing was beautiful. The setting was bleak, but you could tell how much Ava loved the swamps, too. The voice of a 13 year old girl was very good. Ava was a survivor and mature in some ways, but childish in others.

But there was a big stretch of time when I thought, "WHERE is this going?" I thought the Dredgeman's story was somewhat interesting, but the magical realism (?) elements were just... weird. Like, the author could have written two different stories. One about a family who lives in the everglades, and one about a girl who becomes a spiritulist. I guess I'm trying to reconcile how they fit together. I know they have to. Right?

[chicacocodrilo]

I walked away from this one thinking "Meh" and "Can see why this didn't wow the Pulitzer board--but why'd it even make it to the board?" I think I've said it before, but: I feel like it got away from the author. She was so focused on setting the scene and atmosphere that the plot unraveled and her characters kept fading in and out of believability.

I didn't have a problem with the ambiguity of the ending as I didn't need an "everything's good now" resolution, but it felt more that the author petered out of story than really ended it. And the magical realism aspect had the potential to be pretty compelling, but I think having Ava as the narrator really curbed its effectiveness.

I'm looking forward to what she does next since I did like her writing at times. But I hope it's not another short story-to-novel idea, because this one didn't really succeed, at least for me.

[msmerymac]

Yeah. I think in the next few weeks I'll be able to work out if I liked it or not. It was a little hard to keep reading at times, but that doesn't necessarily make a book bad, IMO.

But because it was nominated for the pulitzer, I keep thinking there are some big themes or something I'm missing about this book being really amazing. But it only has a 3-point-something on Goodreads, so it's not just us!

[5kcandlesinthewind]

I didn't even finish this. I forget how far I got, maybe 50 or 100 pages in, but I just couldn't give a damn about any of it.