Book Review: Hoot

Title: Hoot

Author: Carl Hiaasen

Publisher: Random House

Date: 2002

ISN: 0-440-41939-5

Length: 292 pages

Quote: “Roy ordinarily didn’t look out the window of the school bus. He preferred to read…But on this day, a Monday (Roy would never forget), Dana Matherson grabbed Roy’s head from behind…”

Thus Roy, who is one of the smaller boys in grade seven, notices a feral boy called Mullet Fingers. And acquires a girl friend, Beatrice the Bear. And saves the nests of three families of endangered birds. And utterly humiliates Dana, the bus bully. And learns to catch fish in his own bare hands. How he accomplishes all this is, of course, not entirely to his own cleverness and determination, though clever and determined he is, but due to the hilarious chains of human foibles, coincidence, luck, and subtropical ecology that make all of Hiaasen’s novels great snarky comedy fun.

Like Hiaasen’s novels for adults, this first book aimed at teenagers is basically meant to be chortled over at the beach, but to leave readers with a greater awareness of Florida’s unique and endangered ecosystems.

I say this as a person who has been able to appreciate Florida’s ecosystems almost only through the fiction of Carl Hiaasen and Piers Anthony. For the first forty years of my life I had an aunt, not a great-aunt but a great and wonderful aunt, who lived in Florida and was always inviting people to occupy her rental properties. Taxes on unoccupied rental properties were meant to be ruinous. So my mother would do her sisterly duty and take us to Florida, and this wonderful aunt would have planned all these wonderful opportunities for us to observe the pelicans and egrets and other wonders of the Everglades; and in a few hours I would, to all appearances, come down with a nasty messy head cold. And these “colds” would last about as long as the visit to Florida did; I’d stop sneezing and wheezing, like clockwork, about the time our car or bus rolled out the north side of Atlanta. The year we spent two months in Florida I wheezed for two months and even had asthma. I never enjoyed Florida and was never much fun to entertain there, although my aunt never gave up trying. Eventually I came to realize that those never had been “colds”; on the Gulf Coast they sprayed poison into the air in hopes of keeping the mosquito populations low, and although no mosquito ever looked at me when it had a chance to annoy Mother, the mosquito poison always made me ill.

Around that time my Significant Other observed that he usually felt ill when he went to visit a beloved relative on the Atlantic Coast of Florida. He said that down there the chemical pollution was even worse; nobody was worried about protecting the wildlife, so he hardly ever saw a bird. He, too, always seemed to have mild “colds” in Florida, no matter how warm the weather was, or how much fun he and his relatives were having.

This was shortly before we realized that with all the different people in our extended families, with all their various chronic health concerns, all of them consistently had flare-ups at the same times. And those times were after “pesticide” spraying, especially glyphosate spraying, in our own part of the world. Commercial advertisements tell us that poisoning other species is not the same thing as poisoning humans. Well, they tell us wrong. When "not a thing went right that day," chances are that somebody's sprayed something in your neighborhood.

But in Florida, despite the continual poisoning, the loss of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker and of other species, the special subtropical climate really has allowed a lot of distinctive lifeforms to flourish. Such as, in Hoot, little burrowing owls. Mullet Fingers is fighting desperately to protect these owls, in his muddled early-teen-age way, from having their nests bulldozed to make way for a restaurant. As in all Hiaasen novels, there’s a conflict between nice but often bumbling Greens and the Greedheads who really need the humiliation Hiaasen has in store for them.

Pigeon-sized burrowing owls are real; reading the nonfiction about them at https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Burrowing_Owl/overview may add to your enjoyment of the mix-ups and comic ironies in Hoot. Perhaps because the birds aren’t as intelligent as hawks, crows, or even pigeons, in ancient Greece they were said to be the particular pets of the Goddess of Wisdom, which is why the genus names are Athene and Micrathene to this day. For those of us who are not immortal spirits of wisdom, owls are difficult to keep as pets, but they are useful and lovable wildlife. Small owls eat insects. Florida needs all of every insect-eating lifeform it can get.

Another treat this novel offers some readers: Roy’s father is his best friend. Too many novels about teenagers assume that constant quarrelling with at least one parent is part of all teenagers’ experience. As a teenager, even when the’rents got on my nerves, I remember disliking the “nobody has any respect for their parents” cliché; there may still be room in young-adult fiction for stories that explore complicated family relationships but simple rebellion-against-parents has been worn out. Some teenagers do in fact like and respect their parental units, even when complications set in, so it’s a pleasure to meet the fictional Eberhardt family, in which no real complications have set in (yet); not only does Roy like his parents, and they him, but they even like each other. Families like that do exist; there’s no need to make the children of such families feel like freaks…

It’s probably a mistake to over-analyze any Hiaasen novel. They’re comic fiction; things like that don’t really happen. But they ought to. The real world would be not only a funnier but a more satisfactory place if they did.