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.)