During my recent trip to the US I popped in to various bookstores in each city. I spend more time in second-hand shops but I do visit retail establishments as well. While in one of them I picked up a book about challenged literature, novels in particular. I was surprised to see the youth novel Hoot by Carl Hiaasen on such a list. I decided not to flip to the page about this particular novel to discover why it had caused such a controversy and vowed, once I got home, to read it for myself to find out why. Since I had already read two of Hiaasen’s works this year, I found it odd that he would be a target as a challenged author. Thus I kept myself willfully ignorant of the campaign against this particular book, choosing to read it first to find out more.
At 292 pages it only took me two days to finish it. And I was perplexed by the idea that anyone found it controversial. What was the big stink about Hoot? In the story we are introduced to Roy Eberhardt, a teen from Montana whose family has just moved to Florida. On his bus ride to school he is drawn to a mysterious boy running barefoot, and endeavours to track him down. Meanwhile a development site for a new pancake restaurant has been vandalized. A police officer on overnight watch falls asleep in his car and someone spray-paints the vehicle’s windows. I suppose that act of vandalism against an authority figure could possibly be considered as a reason for challenging it. Yet Hiaasen did not glorify the act of vandalism or make the police officer look as if he deserved it.
The barefoot boy, nicknamed Mullet Fingers, is on a one-person campaign to thwart the development project because the construction of the restaurant would destroy the nesting grounds of an endangered colony of burrowing owls. His actions also include removing the seats of all the heavy construction machinery, rendering them useless. So maybe Hiaasen was picked on for writing a supposed pro-vandalism, anti-development or dare I say pro-environment novel. Maybe construction workers and industrial developers felt offended that young people were being indoctrinated to campaign against them.
I didn’t find the dialogue realistic, as no teen boy would have the conversations that Roy has with his parents. And the amazon Wonder Woman character known as Beatrice Leep, a teen athlete almost always referred to by both her first and last names–I have discovered in my reads that it is not uncommon for Hiaasen to write about his characters that way–was not credible. She could ride a bike with Roy sitting in the handlebars? Often? Really?
Hoot was written in 2002 and over twenty years later seems dated for any reader, especially a teen reader now. There are mentions of answering machines, phone books and VHS video rentals from Blockbuster. What young person in 2024 would even know what those things are? Two lines would elicit wide-eyed shock or knit-brow puzzlement from readers today:
“The Eberhardts owned a home computer, which Roy was allowed to use for homework assignments and for playing video snowboard games.”
and then Roy asks his mother:
“‘Mom, can I borrow your camera?'”
Teens of today would have no need to use either a home computer or a camera. Their cellphones would be able to do both jobs.
I will read more of Hiaasen, as I like his Florida settings and his works intended for adult readers appealed to me, yet I will pass on any more of his youth fiction.