Book 56: Flush, by Carl Hiaasen

September was a great month for book released by my favorite contemporary authors. As I mentioned a few posts ago, Neil Gaiman had Anansi Boys, and Carl Hiaasen also returned with his second kids' book. Flush, his second book for the pre-teen/teen set after Hoot, is likewise centered on a kid with a mission. Where Hoot's focus was the preservation of tiny, endangered owls, Flush also has the environment as its primary concern. This time around, a casino owner in the Florida Keys appears to be "flushing" the waste from his boat directly into the water to save money on legal disposal. This waste winds up floating to one of the local beaches - one of the few truly nice ones in the Keys. Not only is the practice disgusting, but it has the potential to make kids and the sea turtles who live in the waters to become quite ill. After our young hero's father is arrested for sinking the boat (it is quickly raised and back in business), things take off. The book is funny as always, and perhaps a bit more prone to the scatalogical than I might like, but I'm obviously in the minority on those sorts of things anyway. There's even a Skink-like character (if you've read Hiaasen's adult books, you know who I'm talking about), which made me consider how much I would enjoy it if Hiaasen would bring Skink into the kid-inhabited world.