Wearing the double face of guide and devil, the Bird Man takes Ava on a long, hellish boat journey in search of her sister. “We have to stick together.” But the cup of kindness turns out to be poisoned. “Swamp people are this country’s last outlaws, kid,” he tells Ava. The Bird Man, a feather-coated drifter with a knack for getting troublesome birds to move on, takes on full life in the second half of the novel. And the landscape itself is a polymorphous symbol for the ambiguities of adolescence - “tides maniacally revised the coastlines,” Ava tells us - as well as for other disasters like the disease that killed her mother: melaleucas swallow 50 acres a day with “a haywire fertility, like a body making cancer.” The Bigtrees’ story gains resonance, too, when we learn the Everglades’ history of governmental mishandling (the seeds of invasive melaleuca trees were sprinkled from airplanes in the 1940s) and environmental disaster at times the family’s stranded island stands in for the nation or even the planet. If Russell’s style is a North American take on magical realism, then her commitment to life’s nitty-gritties anchors the magic we are more inclined to suspend disbelief at the moments that verge on the paranormal because she has turned “Swamplandia!” into a credible world. It’s easier to care about the pleasures and miseries of life in a failing gator park when we know how the father (the self-proclaimed Chief Bigtree) and his family ended up there, and are led to understand what goes into the routine of putting on death-defying shows every day. The setting and the sisters (Ava and Osceola, a k a Ossie) are the same, but they now benefit from a full back story. Vividly worded, exuberant in characterization, the novel is a wild ride: Russell has style in spades.

Now her fans can sink their teeth into her first novel, “Swamplandia!,” a sort of expansion of and sequel to that alligator story. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” with “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” leading a crazy procession of nine other Florida swampland stories, won her wide acclaim, and last year she was chosen one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” top fiction writers. A few months later, Russell’s first story collection, “St. That story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” featured a lusciously strange setting (an alligator theme park in the Everglades) and a tough young heroine with a dead mother and an absent father, as well as a weird problem: how to save her resented-yet-beloved older sister from eloping with a ghost.

In 2006, Zoetrope published a story by a 24-year-old writer, Karen Russell.

Swamplandia author