Book Review: Scat (Carl Hiaasen)

One of my book club members assigned us to read anything by Carl Hiaasen for our June book. I'd never read anything by him before, but when I learned he was the author of Hoot and Flush--two books I didn't read, but had checked out from the library for months thinking we might read them--I decided this was another brilliant opportunity to involve Evan in my book club read.

This kill-2-birds strategy worked out great when I was assigned to read Suzanne Collin's The Hunger Games for book club and ended up reading the entire series aloud with Evan. It turned out to also work out beautifully when we picked out Scat as our next read-aloud.

Evan has been asking for realistic fiction that depicts teens who are in school. Not middle school--high school. As a homeschooler who is considering high school, he's intrigued. Unfortunately, finding appropriate books like that for a 12 year old is a pretty tall order to fill. We went through the same thing when Ben was 12--the hunt for realistic contemporary fiction that's relevant to a pre-teen boy and not set in the woods.

Gratuitous baby Florida panther courtesy of Reuters

Enter Carl Hiaasen. Not only do his young adult books fit the bill, they add in a little environmental education as well. In the case of Scat, we learn about the Everglades and the endangered Florida panther, as teens Nick and Marta try to find their missing Biology teacher who disappeared on a field trip to the Black Vine Swamp. Nick is a great main character for young teen readers. He's warm-hearted and a little naive, and makes a good team with Marta (though, I have to say, we got near the end of the book before I understood that Marta was Hispanic--not a huge big deal, but maybe a bit more character development was in order there?). The mysterious Smoke a.k.a. Duane Scrod, Jr. had more depth and development--at the beginning of the book he comes across as a pretty scary dude, but he definitely has some redeeming qualities. With Smoke and Smoke's dad, Hiaasen showed his mastery at revealing character traits layer by layer. Evan and I also really enjoyed the subplot of Nick's dad being injured in Iraq and the development of their relationship. It's always nice to have an army dad who's not the stereotypical drill sergeant.

I have two complaints, and they're both fairly minor.

First, Hiaasen tends to use full names for his side characters. If I were reading to myself I'd probably just skip over the name, but when reading aloud, "Duane Scrod, Sr. did this"  and "Duane Scrod, Sr. thought that," gets cumbersome. Truthfully, it got annoying enough that reading more than one of his books in a row would be like having a house guest stay on an extra week or two.

Second, the book is written in third person and shifts viewpoints a lot. It works, but we would have liked to stick with each group of characters longer between shifts, and some of the perspectives were less interesting to us than others.

Overall, I highly recommend Scat and look forward to checking out his others. Maybe we'll even get Hoot and Flush read before my book club meets in June.

Soundtrack: It's gotta be Everglades, by the Kingston Trio.
If the skeeters don't get him then the gators will.