Book Review: Fever Beach
Here’s my review of Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen. Don’t forget to leave a comment if you’ve read it too, or if you plan to read it. Then see today’s writing prompt at the bottom of this post.
Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen is an entertaining book with witty banter, highly unlikable characters, and unfolding mysteries and plots that overlap. I would recommend listening to it on audio, as the characters really come to life when you hear them speak and plot with one another. Listening to the characters also makes it easier to appreciate the sarcastic undertones of the novel, to an extent.
I found myself laughing out loud quite a bit when I first started reading the novel, as the sarcastic banter between the characters is entertaining. However, once I got over halfway through the novel, I wanted at least one character with some depth that I could care about following, who wasn’t completely horrible and or so morally gray that they came across as cartoonish. But that didn’t happen. The sarcasm saturating the novel was funny for a bit, but eventually began to feel tiresome to me, I am sorry to say.
I did appreciate how the worst characters in the novel met some sort of poetic justice in the end, and that their fates more or less matched their cartoonish caricatures and what they represented throughout the novel. Yet I did find myself conflicted at the end of the novel, as it seemed to imply that taking hateful extremists less seriously might be okay because they will inevitably weed themselves out because they’re all dolts. And I don’t think that’s true, especially when powerful people are supporting them and funding them. Of course, I like to laugh. But rampant sarcasm and mockery do nothing but make the people wielding them look like stagnant hypocrites in the end, in my opinion. And personally, I can only laugh at so many masturbation jokes in a row. There are many readers who will not share this opinion though, I am sure.
I also found the ways in which the characters’ plans and actions overlapped amusing, especially when Twilly’s character was involved. I didn’t find the other characters as interesting as Twilly and might have been more invested in the novel had it been centered primarily around him and his antics. At times, it seemed like the novel was going to veer in that direction but ultimately didn’t. In the end, there were too many scenes centered around Figgo and Boyette, which made me tune out at points, as they were repugnant and cartoonish. Again, that was probably the point. But it was not really my cup of tea. And again, I think there will be plenty of readers who will enjoy reading about their antics much more than I did.
Overall, this would be a good beach read for readers who enjoy books with a heavy sarcastic tone in which everything is wrapped up nicely at the end, and all the hateful idiots of the world can eventually be ignored or die due to their own stupidity.
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