The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

I picked up The Windup Girl  on a whim at an Ollies. I'd never heard of it, but it won a Nebula and a Hugo, so I felt it was a safe bet. It took me 11 days to read. I guess most people would think that's pretty quick  For me, that's almost glacially slow. I generally finish a book every other day or so. Even non-YA I tend to get through in about three days on average. 11 days is an eon for me. I got pretty frustrated about it too.

I almost put it down in favor of something I could get some momentum going on. I'm glad I stuck with it though. The Windup Girl is a grim look at what GMO companies like Monsanto could do to the world given a chance. The action is set in Thailand where isolationist policies have helped the country survive the collapse of the ecosystem, the melting of the ice caps, and a succession of bio-engineered plagues and blights. As in any setting like this, the balance of power is tenuous and political intrigue tends to be a key element of the plot.

The narrative follows several points of view. Anderson Lake is a calorie man which is something like an industrial spy for the for the big agricultural engineering corporations who wants to crack the secret to Thailand's food independence.  Hock Seng is a Chinese refugee from Malaya that works for Anderson Lake. He however has plans to regain what he lost in Malaya and he's not too pick about how he gets it. Emiko is a windup girl or artificially engineered and created human. She calls herself a new person and is genetically programmed towards obedience. Jaidee is an enthusiastic government official who believes in his duty and is ruthlessly honest. Kanya is Jaidee's subordinate...she has secrets.

None of these characters is a hero. Each is a fully imagined character with both admirable and sinister qualities. The way they are presented is almost clinical. It is almost like Bacigalupi doesn't intend the reader to feel any specific sympathy for any of them. This detachment allows the story to really be about what happens in the world as the precarious position of the Thai wobbles and then falls apart. While many of the characters do distasteful things, all the protagonists are given backstories rich enough to make their decisions believable.

It's a story filled with tension and anxiety. It's in the characters and it's in the setting itself. There is a constant threat of invasion or pandemic. While I'm happy to be done with it, I'm glad I made it all the way through. The resolution was worth the time I spent on it.

Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen is one of those authors that Ryan has been trying to get me to read virtually since the day we met. I've picked up his first book, Tourist Season, several times, but haven't been able to get traction on it. Hiaasen's YA material, however, is another story. I love it all. It's fast paced, features engaging characters, and deals with environmental issues in a savvy responsible way. One of those, Skink: No Surrender, features a character that started out in his non-YA books. So, this is backtracking to the first appearance of Skink.

Double Whammy is about bass fishing. No, really. Bass fishing. I know know more about bass fishing than I ever wanted to. R.J. Decker is a down on his luck private eye with an anger issue. He's hired by a sportsman named Gault to catch some cheaters in the act. This isn't an amorous thing, this is about cheating at big fishing tournaments. It's weird, but pretty straightforward. At least it is until dead bodies start showing up.

Decker meets up with Skink as a sort of local guide. Skink is big, hairy, and slightly crazy, but he has a nice smile and a quick mind. As odd-ball as he is, he takes to Decker's case and soon finds reasons of his own to help out.

I've never really understood people who watch fishing shows for entertainment. I get why fishing is appealing, but the idea of watching people fish on T.V. dumbfounds me. This is a view that Hiaasen seems to share. There's a snarky sarcastic angle to all this where the main characters seem to be bemused on some level that anyone would bother this much for sport fishing that appeals to me.

Skink is a draw too. For such a bizarre character, he's fun to watch. It's like watching disaster walking around in human skin. He's a survivalist who seems to live off of fresh road kill and a manic conviction that the world would be better off without humans. I like him.

Obviously, this isn't intended for a young audience, but I can think of plenty of teens that would love this.

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.