Carolina Hospital

An interesting experiment. As usual, Carl Hiaasen was the best. Not a great read, but light summer stuff. I particularly liked Hiaasen's dehumanizing and desentimentalizing the manatee. It was as though he was saying to the other authors, "Enough of this nonsense! A manatee is an eating and f-cking machine with the mental resources of a piece of celery. He could care less about human foibles and so could I ..."

Remember that game where you get a bunch of people together and one person starts a story then breaks off and the next person continues the story, and so on? Well this book is what happens when that bunch of people are all published authors. Just like those impromptu group stories, this story is a lot of fun, but suffers from characters that suddenly begin acting out of character, plot points that show up suddenly then just drift away, and even chapters that shift genres. Kudos to Carl show more Hiaasen who had the unenviable job of trying to tie down a story that had grown way out of hand and provide a reasonable conclusion to it. show less

The structure of "Naked came the Manatee" reminds me of a game we played in primary school; Person A writes something, passes it onto Person B, who adds to Person A's story, etc., so it ends up like Chinese Whispers. The end result of "Naked came the manatee" is somewhat better written than what my fellow students and I came up with but reading it made me nostalgic for books with a single author.

It was disjointed but it was also not overly interesting and it was only a testament to my show more staying power that I finished the book. Still, others with more nostalgic memories of their primary school class writing projects may enjoy it more. show less

Like the waters of Key Biscayne, in and near where much of the plot of this book occurs, this story is choppy. That's to be expected, given the novel consists of 13 chapters, no two written by the same author. Dave Barry kicks off the story, Carl Hiaasen finishes it, and the writers in between are all seasoned Floridian authors of varying renown. Some of the chapters are funnier than others, some better written, and a couple don't work at all. The approach makes for disjointed storytelling show more at best, and reads more like a series of tenuously interconnected vignettes than an actual story. It's an interesting writing experiment, but one that's been done before and better. If you're a fan of any of these authors or the peculiar inanities of south Florida life, you'll enjoy this book. show less