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A fun Florida 'Flush'

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published September 18, 2005

MEET THE AUTHOR

Carl Hiaasen will appear at the Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 29 at USF St. Petersburg.

FLUSH

By Carl Hiaasen

Knopf Books for Young Readers, $16.95, 263 pp

Are there subjects that are inappropriate for young adult literature?

Carl Hiaasen offers one answer to that age-old question in his latest tale for kids: You can't go wrong by including poop.

Human excrement lies at the heart of Flush, Hiaasen's second foray into kid lit (his first, Hoot, is this year's Read Around Pinellas pick), but not just because poop is a subject that makes most kids laugh. In Flush, Hiaasen is deadly serious about the stuff: It is polluting the waters of the Florida Keys.

Lately, Thunder Beach, where the local kids go swimming and sea turtles lay their eggs, has been registering high levels of toxicity. Paine Underwood is convinced that it is because Dusty Muleman's casino boat has been illegally dumping human waste in the marina. Paine is so convinced Dusty's boat is the culprit, in fact, he has sunk it, an act that has landed him in jail.

"What Dusty's doing can make you real sick at both ends. Hospital-sick, Dad says. So it's not only disgusting, it's dangerous," Paine's son Noah, the preteen narrator of Flush, tells Abbey. Abbey is Noah's baby sister. She's "all right," Noah tells us, "not nearly as irritating as most of the girls at school."

Noah, however, is not only worried about pollution. He is also concerned that his father's anger issues are threatening his parents' marriage. He's already overheard his mom use the D-word with a lawyer.

So what do these red-blooded American kids do? They devise a sure-fire plan, of course, that will vindicate their father and prove that Dusty is indeed a polluter: Operation Flush.

Hiaasen clearly had a lot of fun writing this book, alternating between his two alter egos: a grown man capable of sinking boats in righteous anger and a clever kid who figures out how to thwart evildoers. Although written in simple language for the preteen crowd, he neither dumbs down his prose nor reins in his imagination.

As with his adult novels, he offers up his usual array of bizarre characters with delicious names: Lice Peeking (a permanently soused trailer park denizen); Mr. Shine, the rodent-faced lawyer who usually looks like he's on his way to a funeral; Miles Umlatt, a thin and blotchy newspaper reporter whose "nose was scuffed up like an old shoe;" and a mysterious pirate with scar on his cheek shaped like the letter M.

Hiaasen also provides his usual sufficiently outrageous, but utterly believable (given its South Florida setting) plot, involving greedy entrepreneurs who don't care a whit that they are destroying Florida's environment.

Flush, in fact, is ever bit as wacky as Hiaasen's adult novels such as Skinny Dip and Striptease. It simply leaves out (it's for kids, remember) the bad language, gratuitous violence and girls with big boobs.

Okay, there is Shelly, "a large lady with bright blond hair and a barbed-wire tattoo around one of her biceps." She is Lice's girlfriend, and when Lice disappears and she suspects foul play, she joins the kids in their plot against Dusty.

Will kids like Flush? It certainly has the ingredient I looked for in a novel when I was Noah's age: kids who are smarter than the adults around them and an ending in which the bullies get their comeuppance. This one has the added bonus of a great description of a Florida sunset from a boat:

"The sky was already turning rosy as we raced toward the west side of the islands, where we'd have the best view. . . . The bay was even smoother than the ocean - it looked like pale blue silk. We stopped at Bowlegs Cut, drifting out through the markers on a hard falling tide. Frigate birds soared overhead, and a pod of dolphins rolled past us, herding mullet. . . . In the distance, somewhere beyond the Gulf of Mexico, the sun was dropping through a coppery and cloudless heaven. None of us dared to say a word, everything seemed so crystal-still and perfect. . . . Abbey was kneeling in the bow, aiming her camera as the last molten slice of light dripped out of sight."

[Last modified September 17, 2005, 09:38:04]