Title: Swamplandia!
Description: The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline. And Swamplandia!, the family's island home and theme park, in the Florida Everglades, has sophisticated competition - The World of Darkness. Ava is a resourceful, but terrified twelve-year-old, who must manage seventy gators, and the vast landscape of her grief. Her mother, Swamplandia!'s star attraction, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her Grandpa has been sent to an old folk's home; her brother has defected to The World of Darkness to keep the family afloat; and her father is AWOL. To save them, Ava must journey on her own to a perilous part of the swamp called the Underworld, a harrowing odyssey from which she emerges a true heroine.
Subjects: Death, Mothers, Motherless families, Girls, Fiction, Amusement parks, Large type books, Alligators, New York Times bestseller, nyt:trade_fiction_paperback=2011-12-10, Familie, Alligatoren, Freizeitpark, Madchen, Reading Level-Grade 7, Reading Level-Grade 9, Reading Level-Grade 8, Reading Level-Grade 11, Reading Level-Grade 10, Reading Level-Grade 12, Florida, fiction, Fiction, general, Quests (Expeditions)
Places: Ten Thousand Islands (Fla.), Everglades (Fla.)