Hiaasen, Carl. Hoot

It's not always the case that books you're eager to finish are the best books. It took me so long to read Kavalier & Clay that I had to go back to the beginning and start all over again, and that's a book that was fully deserving of all its acclaim; on the other hand, there are other books where I'm desperate to find out what happens next, all the way up to the end, and then it all feels shallow and silly in retrospect. But it's telling that I had time to start and finish this book while trying to force myself through Eragon (more on that anon, if I can manage).

In this one, middle-school student Roy moves from Montana to Coconut Cove, Florida, and has to adjust. He meets a strange kid who doesn't wear shoes or go to school, and also a girl, Beatrice. There is vandalism going on around the construction site of a chain pancake restaurant, where protected burrowing owls live. This isn't an especially surprising book if you're that far above the age of the target audience, but it is fun to see how it all comes together, and I'd rather not reveal too much of the plot.

There's a lot to like; the grade-school environmentalism, the civil disobedience. It's a book that strikes a very good balance, proving that you can have interesting and well-developed characters without lapsing into plotless introspective character study. The book actually has a plot! And it's a genuinely fun, cute, warm story. It made me happy. I like how it acknowledges and hints at darker things and family dysfunction without being a Family Dysfunction Book... just like it talks about the hard things about moving to a new place, without being a Moving Book.

I hate those, just as an aside. It seems like every second kid's book is a Moving Book, and all of them say that all you need is a better attitude; there aren't any suburbs that seem engineered to cut off freedom until you're old enough to have a car, there aren't dysfunctional schools, there is absolutely no legitimate reason to prefer one place to another because one is interchangeable with the next. I'm not saying I was necessarily right to reflexively rebel against the place I moved when I was twelve, but I certainly didn't have my mind changed by getting patted on the head and told to have a better attitude. I hated that place till I was eighteen, and I'm still not fond of it now.

But this is a book that largely doesn't share those faults, and I think that's in part because of how much Hiaasen genuinely cares about Florida, and its environment. You get cottonmouths, alligators, owls, osprey, fish, Florida's shrinking wild places--but not in a depressing way. It's a hard thing to pull off, writing an environmentalist book that doesn't fall into "We're all gonna die!" despair, but Hiaasen ends up pulling it off really well.

So while there was nothing particularly stunning about this book, I still have to say that it's a great deal better than I ever could've expected it to be; it's solid, it's fun, the pacing is great, and it's got a good ending. The world needs more happy books.