Carl Hiaasen
Carl Hiaasen (1953 - ) is a Florida-born journalist, essayist, and novelist who has both embodied and transcended his native state. He embodies it by knowing it as well as any living writer, with the possible good company of Dave Barry. He transcends it by possessing the ability and artistry to view it with critical distance. He can work up a powerful passion of iconoclasm, a muckraker’s ferocious energy in going after the criminals, especially in environmental concerns. Simultaneously, however, he is a careful and fair observer of how the strange state of Florida works from day to day.
In my many years’ experience with the state (I still have family in Sarasota), I have traveled it north to south, east to west, Hiaasen captures it as well as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and John D. Macdonald did. His skill at creating colorful characters and winging wild plots with gusto has disguised sometimes his remarkable writing. Up here in central Pennsylvania he is one of my bestselling “mystery” writers, suggesting that good writing has no regional limitations.
Please note that I carry all his adult fiction, his columns from his long career at the Miami Herald, and his fine young adult novels.
Chomp
Chomp
In this hysterical #1 New York Times bestseller, one kid has to wrangle gators, snakes, bats that bite, and a reality show host gone rogue! This is Carl Hiaasen's Florida--where the creatures are wild and the people are wilder!
When Wahoo Cray's dad--a professional animal wrangler--takes a job with a reality TV show called Expedition Survival!, Wahoo figures he'll have to do a bit of wrangling himself to keep his father from killing Derek Badger, the show's inept and egotistical star. But the job keeps getting more complicated: Derek Badger insists on using wild animals for his stunts; and Wahoo's acquired a shadow named Tuna--a girl who's sporting a shiner courtesy of her father and needs a place to hide out.
They've only been on location in the Everglades for a day before Derek gets bitten by a bat and goes missing in a storm. Search parties head out and promptly get lost themselves. And then Tuna's dad shows up with a gun . . .
It's anyone's guess who will actually survive Expedition Survival. . .
"Only in Florida--and in the fiction of its native son Carl Hiaasen--does a dead iguana fall from a palm tree and kill somebody." -- New York Post
"Chomp is a delightful laugh-out-loud sendup of the surreality of TV that will be enjoyed by readers of all ages." -- Los Angeles Times