Stormy Weather: Carl Hiaasen

"Two honeymooners wake up early, make love twice, and brace themselves for a spectacle they won't be watching from the sidelines. A seductive con artiste stumbles into a scam that promises more cool cash than the lottery. A shotgun-toting mobile home salesman is about to close a deal with disaster. A law school dropout will be chasing one Gaboon viper, a troop of storm-shocked monkeys, and a newfound love life, while tourists by the thousands bail from the Florida Keys. We're no entering the hurricane zone, where hell and hilarity rule. And in the hands of the masterful, merciless Carl Hiaasen, we're going to have some weather."

(First off, I finished this book a couple of weeks ago, I just didn't get a chance to review it with finals and all...)

My aunt read this book on a recent cruise and passed it on to me. She loved it: describing it as a little sick, a little raunchy, but all good. Her oldest daughter has been reading Hiaasen's Y.A. books and she likes his writing as well. Personally, this was my first encounter with Hiaasen's works.

I liked his writing. It was witty and blunt, but surprisingly eloquent. His characters were eerily realistic in their satire. Hiaasen isn't afraid of offending anyone and that is definitely admirable.

The storyline was extremely complex and, in the beginning, I worried how Hiaasen was going to make it all come together. He didn't disappoint and his ending was very satisfying. Initially, it seemed like it went in twenty different directions. I couldn't even begin to wrap my mind around it all. The way that Hiaasen was able to link everything was truly "masterful".

As I mentioned before, the characters were fantastic. I have a feeling that Hiaasen wrote a bit of himself into Skink because (and this might not make sense to anyone but myself) the character's actions were so like the author's writing style. I found this really interesting. Another character I liked was Augustine. His cynicism was amusing and his caustic personality made him interesting.

Overall, I liked this book. It really wasn't something I normally read and that made it a big change from my normal reviews. The beginning of the book took me a while to get through, but it was worth the effort.