Penguin Random House just sent me an email suggesting Swamplandia! as a "light read".
...
I'm laughing.
Genuinely.
Swamplandia! broke my heart.
Due to the simple fact that i didn't see it coming.
I let the protagonist, Ava down.
I couldn't stop it, it's literature, the story exists already.
The only way to prevent it from happening is to stop reading and i couldn't leave Ava that way.
But i should have seen it coming.
As an 'adult', as someone who knows better, i should have been more protective over her, instead of willing her to continue her Hellish pursuit and realising the inevitable too late.
I feel a genuine sense of guilt and that's something new for me in the literary world.
It's a testament to Karen Russell's writing.
And just how bloody wonderful the act of reading is.
The London Review of Books says it with more eloquence than i'm managing:
'Ava's narrative occupies fertile territory half-way between realism and fantasy, innocence and experience... Russell leaves just enough for us to question our reading of events, so that when the scales fall from Ava's eyes we are implicated in her naivety.'
LIGHT READ, MY ASS.
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