Star Island

It's been a very long time since I first read Tourist Season, but Hiaasen's viciousness towards the venal and corrupt stupid infesting his beloved Florida has not abated one bit. Now his ire is focused on wild celebrities and the people who prey on them. No, it's not really Hiaasen at his best, but it's a polished, scabrous romp through a particularly repulsive underbelly.

We have a corpulent, sweaty paparazzi; a spoiled, out-of-control, barely talented pop star; her put-upon stand-in whose existence she is blissfully unaware of; her mother, who thinks all her drug-overdoses are food-poisoning; her skeevy manager; her plastic PR people and her ex-con, facially disfigured, cattle-prod wielding bodyguard. When the paparazzo accidentally show more kidnaps the stand-in, she has to be gotten back without alerting the police or the pop-star.

And so a weird, dysfunctional farce begins, wherein the disfigured sociopath with the weed-strimmer for a hand is one of the more sympathetic characters. It's funny, well-written, on-target, and if it's not quite as wild and weird as you might want it to be, well it's still a lot of fun. show less

A relentless, humorous send-up of talentless, depraved pop-singers, young vacant actors with ridiculous names (Tanner Dane Keefe,) their greed-driven enablers, stalker paparazzi, moronic night-club themes (Pubes) and Miami Beach night life in general.

The pop singer, Cherry Pye, is so reliably besotted that her clueless parents and smarmy manager employ a look-alike, Ann, to make appearances for Cherry when she’s too hammered. When Ann is kidnapped by a paparazzo who thinks she’s Cherry, things turn strange. Disfigured bodyguards and former Governors of Florida now living as Hermits (Skink) come into play. Hiaasen keeps it all boiling nicely as the story plays out.

Classic Hiassen! I love it when he skewers those who so desperately deserve it. From the inane talentless little twits who are promoted ad nauseum and their parents who want to don’t really care about (or want to actually parent their offspring), but rather manage them (and get a nice paycheck out of it), to the soulless money-grubbing industry that promotes them and the photogs that earn their keep hustling to get “the shot”. This book has it all, with the twisted wit that is Hiassen! It’s a really fun read about all those shallow people who should get their comeuppance and most of them do!

3.5 Hilarious satirical send-up of South Beach life and no-talent movie stardom (think Kardashians) in which promoters, the adoring fans, and the celebrities themselves are all to blame for the vapid lifestyle and money machine that perpetuates the cycle. This was my first Hiassen for adults and it definitely is for adults in that he spares no crassness or vulgarity in capturing the "true" essence of the situation. I did appreciate the crossover character of Skink, the short-term FL governor, now Everglades-dwelling environmental vigilante who does not suffer fools lightly (really, at all), whom I knew from his YA title book. There are a lot of plot threads here, but they all come together well by the end. Center of the story is Cherry show more Pie, an underage lip-syncher (no talent) with a big image, ego, and publicity machine behind her (Maury, her promoter, and the sadistic former-felon bodyguard, Chemo who is supposed to keep her on the straight and narrow, her uptight twin publicists, her enabling parents, Janet and Ned Bunterman, her B-list celebrity boyfriend Tanner Dane Keith, an obsessed paparazzo, Bang Abbot and her unknown look-alike, "normal" actress Ann DeLusio.) Cherry is a train -wreck of a girl who repeatedly overdoses, does outrageous things and thinks the world revolves around her (think Lindsay Lohan in the 2000s) Her upcoming tour (Skantily Klad) is the only hope to salvage her career and everyone in her entourage is striving/conniving to make this happen, but she unknowingly (unthinkingly) is doing everything in her power to tank it. Ann stands in multiple times for the public/paparazzi while Cherry is passed out/in rehab/on the lam. She is accidentally kidnapped by Bang Abbot, which everyone tries to turn to their advantage. She reaches out to Skink for rescue and things really get convoluted and wild. Either Hiassen has a fabulous imagination or I have way too much naivete when it comes to Hollywood gossip. It's a fun escapist story with a lot of humor and sarcastic commentary on our times. show less

I never thought I would give a Carl Hiassen book only three stars but sadly, that’s the most that “Star Island” deserves. This is a competent comedy written by a man who is normally a comic genius.

All Hiassen’s usual characters are here, “Skink” the one-eyed ex-governor turned crazy eco-warrior. “Chemo” the scary killer with the peeled face and the bitten off hand from “Skinny Dip”. There is the usual chaotic larger-than-life plot revolving around greedy, grasping people who are so amoral they have little or no understanding of what they have become and there are the few characters whose humanity, independence and refusal to give up makes them shine in the human-swamp that surrounds them.

But the story lacks passion. show more Hiassen seems to be going through the motions. Skink, for once, seems lost and not entirely sure of why he’s there. Dear God, he even ends up in a pin-striped suit. Chemo loses his menace and even seems to develop a conscience.

The evil that the bad people do is largely to themselves and is hard to get excited about.

The book is redeemed by the two main female characters, Cherry Pie, the young self-abusing pop-star and her body-double, spunky actress, Anne.

These are the women that Hiassen seems to fall in love with in the book and that love drives everything else. He does a wonderful job of showing Cherry as more than an air-head. My heart went out to her because she wants to called “Cherish” because it sounds cool but I couldn’t help seeing the pathos of this name for someone who has never been cherished.

Anne is brave and funny and honest and gets all the best lines. What’s not to love. Except perhaps that she treats the governor as an accessory, a plot device in the drama of her life, rather thana person. Perhaps this is what makes her the perfect actress.

The book is of course well written, it made me laugh. It just wasn’t as good a “Skinny Dip” or “Nature Girl”.

Perhaps I’m missing the point. Perhaps what Hiassen wanted to show was that the paperazzi-ridden pop world is so fake it kills all real passion but I don’t think so. show less

"Star Island" is classic Carl Hiaasen: a wild romp, set (of course) in South Florida, and filled with despicable but hilarious characters who get their due. Cherry Pye is a 22 year-old hard-living pop star, who wants nothing more than to get and stay high--and to change her moniker to Cherish. To protect her reputation, her parents and her manager hire Ann DeLusia, a look-alike actress, to pretend to be Cherry at events that the singer herself is too smashed to attend. They also hire a body guard: Chemo, a 7 foot ex-con with seriously pock-marked skin, and an amputated arm that's been replaced with a weed-whacker. When Ann is kidnapped by Bang Abbott, an obese, odiferous paparazzo pursuing a money shot of Cherry, it's up to Lucy and show more Lila Lark, the over-Botoxed twins who serve as publicists for Cherry, to manage the situation, and they'd prefer that Ann disappear rather than let the public know that Cherry has a double. But this is actually Ann's second kidnapping in just a few days, and her prior kidnapper, who took a liking to her, has promised to help her out whenever she needs it. Hiaasen readers will recognize the first kidnapper: it's Skink, the eco-terrorist former governor Florida who now lives as a hermit in a camp in the swamps, and is known to take outrageous steps to punish those whose actions will harm the local environment--like tying up a condo developer and placing a spiny sea urchin in his underwear!

Like all Hiaasen novels, the plot is complex, and the writing is first-rate. It's not great literature, but it's great fun to read. show less

Hiaasen, Carl. Star Island. Skink No. 6. Knopf, 2010.
I originally rated Star Island three rather than four stars because it is an “average” member of Hiaasen’s oeuvre. But then this time around I was more aware of how much ahead of the pack of writers of the comic thriller (if that is a thing) Hiaasen’s work is. For example, when was the last time you read, say, a Stephanie Plum story with five well-developed and nuanced characters who weren’t unchanged from their previous instantiations? Star Island has that. Skink is subtly different here than he is in previous stories. We are more aware of how fragile he is and how emotionally vulnerable. Who would have guessed that he could develop a first-sight crush on a twenty-something show more actress? Then, there is Cherry Pye, the self-absorbed, drugged out pop singer whose performances are all lip-synched and who needs a body double to make public appearances for her when she is in rehab. The satirical portrait of her is unrelenting, yet we feel a bit sorry for her as the victim of her parents who value her mainly as a meal ticket. She is also victimized by an obsessed paparazzo and a bodyguard with a weed trimmer as a prosthetic hand. Captain Hook should be so lucky. Finally, there is Anna, the body double, the novel’s protagonist and the object of Skink’s affection and protection. As such, she becomes the pawn in multiple plots, and we root for her to escape from this bizarrely corrupt Florida crew. 4 stars. show less