Swamplandia! - Karen Russell

Reading the jacket copy (OK - online copy) of this book turned me off - a story of a family of misfits told from the perspective for a precocious young girl. I relented eventually, though the fact that it was nominated along with The Pale King for the Pulitzer should have warned me off. (I'm a DFW fan, but The Pale King as a notebook that should have been left unpublished)

Swamplandia! starts off strong but gets murkier the more it goes along. Alternating between characters and perspective doesn't help, and there's a hollowness in the characters that echoes in the prose. The first-person accounts from Ava are so over the top with metaphor they are reminiscent of a undergrad creative writing workshop, while the third person chapters told from her brother's point of view skirt the edges of any real emotion.