Nature Girl

January 29, 2007
Like the prolific animal and insect life of the Everglades, Hiaasen's latest contains a cacophony of voices that clash with one another yet come together in the end to form an unique world. Hiaasen's novels compare favorably to the films of Robert Altman, as the author uses an ensemble approach rather than relying on one story. Adams is enthusiastically up to Hiaasen's hijinks, finding the right note for every character. Particularly good is her rendition of 12-year-old Fry, who stretches his vowels for emphasis and makes every sentence sound like a possible question. Piejack, the local looney fishmonger, and Honey, a borderline personality unable to overlook any slight, are performed with twangy gusto. And then there are the Texans, Boyd and his reluctant girlfriend, Eugenie, who bring another set of accents into the mix. In a wonderful moment on the last disk, Adams hilariously reproduces the muffled sentences of a person who has had her jaws wired shut. Adams's brisk style is perfect for Hiaasen's witty romp through the Everglades. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 18).

Starred review from September 18, 2006
Old fans and newcomers alike should delight in Hiaasen's 11th novel (after 2004's Skinny Dip
), another hilarious Florida romp. The engaging and diverse screwball cast includes Boyd Shreave, a semicompetent telemarketer; Shreave's mistress and co-worker, Eugenie Fonda; Honey Santana, a mercurial gadfly who ends up on the other end of one of Shreave's pitches for Florida real estate; and Sammy Tigertail, half Seminole, who at novel's start must figure out what to do with the body of a tourist who dies of a heart attack on Sammy's airboat after being struck by a harmless water snake. When Santana cooks up an elaborate scheme to punish Shreave for nasty comments he made during his solicitation call, she ends up involving her 12-year-old son, Fry, and her ex-husband in a frantic chase that enmeshes Tigertail and the young co-ed Sammy accidentally has taken hostage. While the absurd plot may be less than compelling, Hiaasen's humorous touches and his all-too-human characters carry the book to its satisfying close. 600,000 first printing; author tour.

Starred review from October 1, 2006
Honey Santana, a self-proclaimed "queen of lost causes," has had it with dinnertime telemarketers. She locates Boyd Shreve, a particularly offensive example of the lot, and lures him and his telemarketer paramour on a kayaking ecotour through some of the Thousand Islands of southeastern Florida. Honey intends simply to teach him a lesson in manners, but her abduction turns ugly when her boss at the fish market, Piejack, stalks her through the swamp. When Honey fails to retrieve her son from his father's care at nightfall, her ex-husband and child set off to find her with the help of hermit wannabe Sammy Tigertail, a half-white, half-Seminole former alligator wrestler haunted by the ghost of a tourist who recently died on one of Sammy's swamp tours. This is vintage Hiaasen (Skinny Dip), complete with wacky characters, convoluted plots, strong measures of righteous indignation, and desire for justice deftly woven into a story that is both outrageously funny and startlingly tender. Highly recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/06.]Susan Clifford Braun, Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, CA

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2006
The trend, noticeable in Hiaasen's last few novels, to move ever so slightly away from the apocalyptic edge is evident again in his latest screwball thriller. In fact, this one feels like a Shakespearean comedy, a mix of " A Midsummer's Night Dream" and " As You Like It" in which a group of confused lovers tangle with a gang of "rude mechanicals" deep in the Forest of Arden. Except here Arden is one of the Ten Thousand Islands in the famous Florida wilderness area. And our heroine, playing a variation on Rosalind, is a slightly screwy gal named Honey Santana, who possesses the tragic flaw of demanding "more decency and consideration from her fellow humans than they demand of themselves." That's a tall order when your fellow humans include a foul-smelling fishmonger who may be the world's most deranged stalker and a ne'er-do-well telephone solicitor who has the bad luck of calling Honey at the dinner hour. Before you can say "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Honey, the phone guy, and his comely mistress have landed in Hiaasen's bug-infested Forest of Arden along with the fishmonger/stalker, a Seminole Indian on the lam, and sundry others. There is much chaos, of course, but throughout a long night on the island, there is never a sense of horror lurking behind the high jinks. We stick around for the show, however, even without much suspense, because Hiaasen is still as funny as any thriller writer alive, and because, even at his goofiest, his characters are never mere jokes with legs. There's always something human there, behind the laughter or beyond the horror, and this time that something is almost sweet. "Such sweet thunder," one might call it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)