A heads up to Audio Book Club listeners, for our next meeting on April 25th, we'll be reading Moonwalking with Einstein, a nonfiction title about the limits of human memory by Joshua 4.

So get reading, but not until you've enjoyed this discussion of Swamplandia.

This episode of the Slate Audio Book Club is brought to you by Squarespace.com, the fast and easy way to publish a high-quality website or blog.

For a free trial, go to Squarespace.com slash slate.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club for March 28th.

We are going to discuss Karen Russell's new novel Swamplandia. Big exclamation point at the end of that title. I'm here with Hannah Rosen, Slate's double X editor, my co-conspirator, and John Dickerson, Slate's political correspondent, chief guru in all things.

Hey guys.

Hi.

I want to be called the chief in the context of this book.

He's your co-conspirator too in a different way.

It's true.

You guys are both my co-conspirators and I'm so lucky in that.

So I'm hoping one of you is going to give a nice kind of opening summary of the plot of this book or at least sort of what you took as the main theme of this book. Perhaps we can start there.

I will start. I am going to say outright that I recognizing all the flaws of this novel really, really liked it. And so that's going to color my summary, and I'm going to

put myself out there for you guys to criticize and take me down. This novel is told through the eyes

of a preteen girl whose name is Ava, and her family goes by the name of Big Tree, and her father,

who is chief Big Tree, and they run an amusement park that's essentially an alligator swamp

called Swamplandia, and thus the title of this novel, and they run an amusement park that's essentially an alligator swamp called Swamplandia,

and thus the title of this novel, and thus the exclamation point in this novel. And the novel is

about how Ava, who's coming into adulthood, starts to learn the truths about her family,

the truths about alligator wrestling, and how the family mythology, which has been so painstakingly built up

by her father, Chief Bigtree, and her mother, Halila Bigtree, who dies quite early in the novel,

...