Chomp by Carl Hiaasen

Once I read one of the Hiaasen YAs, I had to go looking for the rest of them. Mainly, I wanted to make sure they were stand alone novels and not part of some series. Turns out that they are all stand alones, which for my purposes, is a good thing.

Chomp is about Wahoo Cray, the son of a professional animal wrangler. Apparently, this is a real thing. Animal wranglers are professionals who work with non domesticated animals by removing them from inappropriate locations and, in some cases, rehabilitating injured animals and training them. These animals are then sometimes used as stand ins for their wild counterparts in nature shows and documentaries. Who knew? I learn something new every day and from the strangest places.

Anyway, Wahoo's father gets hired to wrangle for a reality tv show reminiscent of "Crocodile Hunter."  The difference is that Steve Irwin was actually a fairly competent wrangler himself. Derek Badger, the TV personality in Chomp is a egotistical and generally useless person who I pretty much immediately wanted to punch in the face. Wahoo's dad seems to agree with me. 

Wahoo and his dad have to keep this yahoo alive in the Florida Everglades as everything proceeds to go wrong.

This is a fast paced book. As always with Hiaasen's YA, ecological concerns are front and center but not the main thrust of the plot. There were two things that I found particularly interesting. First, apparently Burmese Pythons have become a major invasive species in southern Florida. I used to keep a ball python when I was younger. However, I lived in Michigan so if my python got away from me, it was unlikely that it was going to have much of an environmental impact. South Florida however has a very hospitable climate to a python's way of thinking. The problem is that the Burmese Pythons get big enough to successfully kill a human and have no natural predators in the Florida everglades so they are pretty much running rampant. There is an actual campaign to exterminate them. Interesting stuff.

Second, Chomp really got me thinking about nature programming and reality tv. The line between educational/informational programming and entertainment has become blurred in recent years. This is having many deleterious effects.  Nature shows, like the one described in Chomp, encourage a certain contempt for the natural world. I think when they started, the idea was to educate and raise awareness, but somewhere along the way, they turned into idiots doing stupid dangerous things and surviving it. I'm not opposed to entertainment, but when it's presented as fact oriented educational programming, people believe it's real.  This is a problem and it's one that Chomp obliquely addresses.

Skink: No Surrender by Carl Hiaasen

There is this crazy subgenre of gonzo crime caper novels mostly set in Florida. These books are brutal and absolutely enthralling. While they are no more violent or bloody than other books in the horror or crime genres, I find them much more disturbing for the bizarre inventiveness of the crimes. For example, in one book a woman is murdered by having fix-a-flat sprayed down her throat and into her lungs which sounds like an awful way to go. There are a handful of authors in this genre. Apparently Florida is a pretty wacky place.

One things I can conclusively say is that this genre of books is not YA. However, one of the authors of the genre, Carl Hiaasen, has written a few highly regarded YA/middle reader books. I was intrigued and picked up Skink: No Surrender for cheap on my recent buy. It was a quick read and indeed totally appropriate for YA/Middle readers.

Skink is apparently a recurring character in some of Hiaasen's nonYA but the main character of this book is actually a kid named Richard. Richard's friend/cousin Malley has run off with some guy she met online. Malley's a bit of a wild child so no one is really surprised that she ran off, but her friends and family are understandably worried. Richard, after doing some online research, becomes increasingly alarmed and eventually goes out to look for her aided by Skink.

Skink is a mentally unhinged ultra moral eco-warrior. A self-styled vigilante who protects Florida's wilderness from litterbugs, poachers, and industrial polluters. Apparently, he's quite out of control in the non-YA books. However, in this book, he serves as a kind of guardian-protector for Richard as he tries to rescue Malley.

This is a fast paced adventure story featuring a series of unlikely but highly amusing events. As bizarre as Skink is, the interaction between him and Richard is not creepy at all. It's a good book to hand teens as it illustrates the dangers of online predators without being at all heavy-handed.