Which of those squiggles IS the Mangrove river? Well, I figure a postcard would highlight the whole vague squishy oozing directional swamp something like this:
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I know a threaded channel doesn't break any of the usual river rules, it is just an edge case. Well, this is an over-the-edge case :-) , with a gazillion channels and another gazillion hummocks, islets, ash-bars (did I mention the volcanoes upriver?), individual trees, and dubious navigability. Locals use poled flatboats drawing mere inches, and I'm sure there are enough deeper channels, albeit shifting ones, to get modest motor launches through.
What DOES break a usual rule, is the outlet of those lakes. If you look at it as one river, "only one outlet" stands as stated. From the ground (or water... or mud... or back of a gator) though it would in effect be a hundred or more channels leaving from a downstream lakeshore many miles long. Exactly like the Everglades used to leave Lake Okeechobee. "Modern" notions about what is useful land use & water use put a dike along Okeechobee's rim, and has tried to drain the land for agriculture. Only in recent decades have people begun to realize what a horrible idea that was; the massive wetlands need to work free-flow, not "managed". Canals in the area are even being filled in and the meandering channels restored.
Wondusoland has had no such management, other than an occasional dredged channel to get bigger boats from here to there. Aurora is set in an analogue of Earth's 1940's / 1950's, and the country itself is a backwater in every possible meaning of the term.
Another way to break or bend the multiple outlet rule is for a lake to have a dead-level hard rim. That can happen; mineral deposits can build up what's called Travertine Dams - picture the scene at various hot springs around our world. On a big enough scale.... Lake Junumbele. So here I'm assuming the innate geochemistry of the area is prone to those formations, and that the volcanoes at Wondusoland's NE edge produce copious amounts of ash. Build that up, and you could get wide-overflow waterfalls miles wide. The exact width would change as flow breaks through here or there, but unlike a normal eroding lake outlet, travertine dams have a tendency to heal breaches.
This is an inhospitable jungle-y isthmus - land continues off to the ESE and WNW. Of the tropical cyclones arising in the far end of that ocean to the NE, maybe a quarter of them blunder through this map area; the worst of their force is blunted by a low coastal range, but in addition to normal tropical rainfall, these people get periodic typhoon inundations. Bit of ash-y eruption, bunch of rain, downstream channels clog and open, aaaaand repeat. Ad nauseum. And the ash varies between toxic and fertilizer, so you get vegetation die-offs clogging bayous too, not to mention fish kills occasionally to add to the ambiance.
The gators like it.
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