It suits her, and the rest of us, so beautifully. It’s been rare to hear such words from a mouth like Russell’s. In Swamplandia!, an Anglo-American girl from Florida churns out brilliant, brutal passages like this one, in which narrator Ava waxes historical: “Prejudice…was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic…It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery on Cypress point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.” It’s of note that the kind of unflinching look Swamplandia! takes at the devastation wrought on the Americas and their people from 1492 until the present has, until now, been largely the realm of immigrant writers and writers of color.
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