The Nature of Things

This is a very hard book to categorize. It is part thriller, part paranormal romance, part survivalist family saga, but mostly it is a coming-of-age story. The three Bigtree children, Kiwi, Osceola, and Ava, come of age in various ways in the pages of the book. The Bigtree children and their parents live on an island in the Florida swamps which the patriarch of the family, the children's grandfather, named Swamplandia. They have a kind of theme park there to entice the tourists and they are hanging on to solvency by a thread. Their shtick is wrestling alligators and the star of their show and their family is the mother of the family.  We meet them as tragedy strikes. Their star, the anchor of the family, falls ill from ovarian cancer and dies. The Bigtrees are bereft and at a loss as to how to cope. The theme park flounders under the loss of its star and competition from a rival park called The World of Darkness. It is what Ava calls "the beginning of the end." The Bigtre...