Two wildly different teens are flung together amid dire circumstances in the fast-paced action-adventure story Swamped! from veteran journalist and bestselling author Ken Wells, and his writer and comedian niece Hillary Wells.
Swamped! readers are first introduced to Jack Cane Landry — Louisiana homeboy and self-professed swamp rat — who, having snagged a job for a high-end swamp tour company, wants to ditch school and become a fulltime guide.
Poised, attractive and well-traveled, Olivia FitzGerald loves her private New York City prep school and is Harvard bound. When Olivia and her philanthropist father jet in for a tour of Louisiana’s Great Atchafalaya Swamp that Jack will help guide, destinies and cultures collide, and the two teens become equal partners in an epic story of survival.
The plane carrying the party to their remote campsite crashes, and Jack and Olivia are the only apparent survivors. Jack soon learns his swamp savvy may not be enough to assure their rescue, but Olivia proves to be no damsel in distress. And she just might have a few survival tricks up her designer sleeves.
As Jack and Olivia face down the denizens of the swamp — lethal reptiles, a prowling swamp cat, a gun-toting ne’er-do-well and weather intent on killing them — Swamped! wraps nonstop adventure into an unlikely love story.
In style, Ken Wells calls the story “a romp in the swamp, basically a gumbo western” but with overarching themes touching on culture, class, courage, resilience and resourcefulness. One reviewer compares Swamped! to Hatchet, the gold-standard of young-adult survival novels but with great crossover appeal for adult readers.
At 1.4 million acres, the Great Atchafalaya is the largest river swamp in the U.S. and a scenic and ecological rival to Florida’s Everglades National Park — yet it remains an exotic mystery to most of America. “The amazing thing about the Atchafalaya — it’s a wondrous place to go see giant alligators and magnificent birdlife, but you wouldn’t want to be stuck out there with no food, no water and no way to tell anybody that you’re lost!” Ken Wells said in a recent interview.
In Swamped! the Wellses use their insider knowledge and crisp writing skills to bring the forbidding Great Atchafalaya alive. “The sense of place is unerring,” said Ken Wells, “and we think the book has the appeal of introducing a national audience to an ecosystem and culture (the Cajuns) that many may not have imagined could have existed.”
About the Authors
Ken Wells grew up with one foot in the Louisiana swamps, the second of six sons of an alligator-hunting father and a gumbo-cooking mother. A longtime writer for The Wall Street Journal, he’s authored five novels of the Cajun bayous, including the coming-of-age classic, Meely LaBauve. He divides his time between Chicago and a log cabin in the wilds of Maine.
Hillary Wells (Ken’s niece) is a writer, comedian and producer who rose from the bayous of South Louisiana to the Los Angeles comedy scene. These days she resides in New Orleans where, in between comedy gigs and cooking up gumbo, she works in the state’s burgeoning film industry. She has a social media following of more than 18,000.
For more information, visit www.bayoubro.com, or follow Hillary Wells on IG (hillarywells), Facebook (heymisswells), TikTok (@hillarywells_) or Twitter (@hillarywells_).
Swamped!
Publisher: Koehler Books
Release Date: January 13, 2023
ISBN-10: 1646638859
ISBN-13: 978-1646638857
Available from Amazon.com, BN.com, bookshop.org and in bookstores nationwide
