Number 47 - Squirm - Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen is another of those authors I've been collecting books by for well over a decade.  As far as I know I have everything he's written, but I am a couple of books behind on reading his YA books. 

His fiction novels all tend to have either one or two word titles.  The two word titles are all adult novels.  The one word titles are for younger people. 

In practice this means that there's no swearing, no sex and the violence is kept offscreen in the one word titles.  They're still the same brand of easy to read lunacy, normally with a very strong environmental message built in.

This one is no exception.  Billy Dickens is a Floridan high school kid who loves wildlife, and just happens to collect snakes.  He won't stand any nonsense and will always fight for the underdog.  This is typical of Hiaasen's lead characters.

Within the first two pages you can't help but like young Billy regardless of how unlikely some of his behaviour may be.

This is a very good thing since Billy is the first person narrator, telling us most of the story in the present tense.

His dad walked out on the family when he was a toddler.  In the first couple of chapters he finds out where his dad lives and cons his mother into letting him fly across the USA to Montana to meet him. His dad turns out to be an eco warrior chasing after a particularly nasty big game hunter and spoiling his hunts.

 Even though this is 276 pages it flies past as if it was half that length.  The weakness of the first person narration is that the bad guy barely features at all, but Billy is such an entertaining narrator that that doesn't really matter.  The closing chapters contain some genuine tension and the message about wildlife preservation is crystral clear without being sledgehammer style unsubtle. 

It's predictable once the pieces start slipping into place, but it's not written for adults.  However, as YA fiction goes, it's easily substantial enough to keep me entertained.  If I wanted to, I could probably pick a plot hole or two - but see the end of the first sentence in this paragraph.  And it's so entertaining it would be churlish to do so anyway.

This is still available from all good booksellers and probably quite a few bad ones as well. 

He has a new adult novel due out in the next month or so, and I've already preordered it.