Nature Girl

Starred review from September 18, 2006
Old fans and newcomers alike should delight in Hiaasen's 11th novel (after 2004's Skinny Dip
), another hilarious Florida romp. The engaging and diverse screwball cast includes Boyd Shreave, a semicompetent telemarketer; Shreave's mistress and co-worker, Eugenie Fonda; Honey Santana, a mercurial gadfly who ends up on the other end of one of Shreave's pitches for Florida real estate; and Sammy Tigertail, half Seminole, who at novel's start must figure out what to do with the body of a tourist who dies of a heart attack on Sammy's airboat after being struck by a harmless water snake. When Santana cooks up an elaborate scheme to punish Shreave for nasty comments he made during his solicitation call, she ends up involving her 12-year-old son, Fry, and her ex-husband in a frantic chase that enmeshes Tigertail and the young co-ed Sammy accidentally has taken hostage. While the absurd plot may be less than compelling, Hiaasen's humorous touches and his all-too-human characters carry the book to its satisfying close. 600,000 first printing; author tour.

Carl Hiaasen fills his novels with some of the strangest characters in fiction--and makes them work. NATURE GIRL is set in the Florida beyond Miami and Disney World, where people like Honey Santana and half-Seminole Sammy Tigertail live quiet, peculiar existences. Night telemarketer Boyd Shreave has insulted Honey with a real estate phone pitch, and she plots a bizarre revenge that brings the three characters together. Narrator Lee Adams adeptly performs the many roles in the book and makes them all seem real, though her teenager is a bit over the top in vapidness. Listeners will hate and love the appropriate people, all the time rooting for the quirky losers. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine