06 May / Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen
Who knows how it happened, but Carl Hiaasen has become my latest reliable antidote to combat the seemingly neverending succession of death and destruction horror titles I’ve been relentlessly reading either by assignment or by choice. Admittedly, many of them have been utterly amazing, but sometimes I just need to shake my head of the gore and let out a guffaw.
Hiaasen’s books for oldsters are not unlike his highly entertaining formulaic titles for younger readers – he’s definitely got the ‘don’t fix what ain’t broke’-theory perfected! His adult titles add a little more sex, a lot more cursing … and, even if they’re not particularly plausible and somewhat predictable, their goofball fun-factor keeps you giggling and laughing.
In Nature Girl, three narrative threads quickly combine for quite the rollicking romp through Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands off southwest Florida’s coast. Sammy Tigertail, a hapa Native American born Chad McQueen, buries a dead man in a river and tries to recover his ancestral roots. Honey Santana, a divorced mother who hears bad pop music in her head, cooks up a preposterous plan to teach a rude telemarketer a lesson he’ll never forget. Boyd Shreave decides to prove to his statuesque mistress – whose last adulterous lover murdered his wife for her! – that he’s not some boring distraction by buying a tacky new wardrobe and presenting her with airline tickets for a Florida vacation. Let the collisions begin …!
Crazy antics abound, including digit-amputating crabs, helicopter rescues, a talking corpse, mating lizards, and an undercover detective who manages to get shot. In between the eye-rolling, you’ll be chuckling along as one nutty adventure compounds another, disintegrating body parts and all!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2006