Fun Reads Friday: Slither into wildlife action with Carl Hiaasen

Lately, I’ve been rediscovering an old friend—Carl Hiaasen.

Carl is a longtime columnist for the Miami Herald and the author of a number of adult novels. I don’t know that I’ve ever finished one of his grownup books. But I’m on second round through his exciting humorous series of middle grade adventures with one word titles like Chomp, Hoot, Flush and Scat. Just this week, I finished rereading Squirm.

These boy-centric novels with strong girl characters are mostly based in Carl’s native Florida, where people and critters fly, prowl, slither, or swim through forests, lakes and everglades.

The teens are forced into the roles of reluctant heroes when adults become too wrapped up in their own daily struggles—and in the case of the bad guys, are too comically ignorant—to grasp the true dangers of the situations. In Chomp, it’s a reality show star who wants to wrestle what he thinks is a lame and tame alligator, even though Wahoo Cray, son of the animal wrangle warns him against such foolishness. It doesn’t go well.

The first of these novels, Hoot, won a Newbery Medal of Honor and was made into an equally delightful movie. It’s the story of three middle-schoolers who take on greedy, corruption, and comical cluelessness to save the homes of rare, ground-dwelling owls.

A couple cautions: The books do contain occasional bad words. They are mild compared to what you hear on TV or in any public outing, but still more than is said in my house.

Second, environmentalism runs through Carl’s books. As a farm boy, I’m cool with that in balance. We treat our land and animals well. But these are secular novels. So while the characters marvel at the beauty of nature and the force built such a fine-tuned ecological system, I smile because I know the Creator. Carl may not recognize it, but his stories often clearly point to a Master Designer.

As I said, I just finished rereading Squirm, set both in the wetlands of Florida and the mountains of Montana. Billy Dickens’ mom keeps uprooting the family to live near nests of bald eagle. Billy’s dad disappeared ten years ago. He seems to have a top secret job with the government involving spy drones, but no one’s sure. Billy instigates a flight to Montana to track down his father. He ends up helping Dad try to thwart a poacher pursing a grizzly bear with two cubs up north and an endangered panther back home in Florida.

Oh, and he needs to figure out how to stop the grizzly from eating his dad when the action returns to Montana and the increasingly frustrated poacher puts Dad on the menu.

What you need to know about Billy is that he always jumps into battle beside the underdog facing injustice. And that Billy catches wild snakes, including a rattler or two. And that if you cross one of Billy “Snake Boy” Dickens’ friends or family, you might come into the unexpected possession of wriggly, slithery, riled-up reptile.

For fun reads packed with adventure, danger, humor, and young heroes, I recommend Carl Hiaasen’s books. Then I recommend following that up by exploring the Bible to discover more about the Creator behind all the magnificent creatures.