She possesses a rather kind and passive personality, and develops a passionate fascination with ghosts after she finds "The Spiritist's Telegraph" in a waterlogged library boat. Osceola is the only sibling without her own narrated chapter in the story, unless you count the chapter about Louis. At seventeen, Kiwi is the oldest Bigtree child. He is studious and academically gifted, but his isolated and self-guided education has left him unprepared for mainland life. He eventually leaves Swamplandia! to work at a rival park, the World of Darkness, in order to earn money for his family. He uses big words, which he frequently mispronounces, and, at least initially, he struggles to relate to the other teenagers he encounters on the mainland. The father of Ava, Osceola and Kiwi Bigtree. On Swamplandia! he goes by the name of Chief Bigtree, even by his children. He has invented a tribal world for his family despite having no native Indian heritage, and is fiercely (and unjustifiably) optimistic about the future of Swamplandia! A mysterious man who appears at Swamplandia! midway through the book. He claims to have magical powers and supposedly guides Ava to "the Underworld" to save her sister. The strange and mysterious Everglades form the essential element for Ava's journey to the underworld. Ten Thousand Islands is not merely alligator country, it is the uncanny river of grass, the haunting gloom in the ever-changing mangrove tunnels, peat bogs, endless sawgrass prairies, abandoned stilt houses and shell mounds left by primordial Native Americans. The swamp is the otherworldly place for Ossie to meet her ghostly boyfriend, yet it is also her and Ava's back yard. Despite her Ohio forebears, Ava is a real native of the swamp environment, like the Indians she is dressed up to resemble. Like the Seminoles who lost their leader, Osceola when he was captured by deception, under a flag of truce, a century ago, Ava is also betrayed. She survives because of her unique fitness in this strange environment. Alternating between Ava's fantastic voyage in the swamp and Kiwi's struggle in his over-chilled dormitory room under The World of Darkness echos the inherent liminality of life in Florida, where land and water combine, weather and sea rise change the shapes of coasts, and the results of man-made canals and drainage projects are evident in historic droughts, invasive species and sink-holes.