Great idea
I was surprised to see that Tourist Season was published almost 20 years ago. It is still a good read today and the issues are still the same: people coming to Florida to retire and die and people coming to Florida on vacation and exploiting the state and the natives.
For me, as a resident of Florida, Tourist Season resonated with my concerns. Tourism creates jobs but they are bad jobs. And despite the Everglades and opportunity for ecotourism, most tourists come to Florida to enter the brightly painted plastic and concrete world of Mickey. Retirees present longer lasting problems.
The title "Tourist Season" is a clever pun on one group of concerned citizens' plan to deal with tourism. In an attempt to reduce Florida's image as one big happy sunshiny beach they being a series of planned attacks on tourism. The idea is to scare off the tourists to protect Florida's ecosystem and economy. Killings and kidnappings are the plan of attack. What seems like an obvious warning to the anti-tourist revolutionaries - a dismembered city official covered in sunscreen and placed in a suitcase with a rubber alligator in his mouth - is written off by police as an oddity and not a political message.
Tourist Season follows an ex-reporter's attempt to find the killers and the killers' attempt to get the press to notice what they are doing so that tourists and retirees will stay out of Florida. It is entertaining and cleverly written. If you aren't Florida and even if you are the constant environmentalist messages may bother you. Hiassen definitely has a one issue approach for why tourists are bad.
Tourist Season is full of dark humor that still resonates today.
Great idea
I was surprised to see that Tourist Season was published almost 20 years ago. It is still a good read today and the issues are still the same: people coming to Florida to retire and die and people coming to Florida on vacation and exploiting the state and the natives.
For me, as a resident of Florida, Tourist Season resonated with my concerns. Tourism creates jobs but they are bad jobs. And despite the Everglades and opportunity for ecotourism, most tourists come to Florida to enter the brightly painted plastic and concrete world of Mickey. Retirees present longer lasting problems.
The title "Tourist Season" is a clever pun on one group of concerned citizens' plan to deal with tourism. In an attempt to reduce Florida's image as one big happy sunshiny beach they being a series of planned attacks on tourism. The idea is to scare off the tourists to protect Florida's ecosystem and economy. Killings and kidnappings are the plan of attack. What seems like an obvious warning to the anti-tourist revolutionaries - a dismembered city official covered in sunscreen and placed in a suitcase with a rubber alligator in his mouth - is written off by police as an oddity and not a political message.
Tourist Season follows an ex-reporter's attempt to find the killers and the killers' attempt to get the press to notice what they are doing so that tourists and retirees will stay out of Florida. It is entertaining and cleverly written. If you aren't Florida and even if you are the constant environmentalist messages may bother you. Hiassen definitely has a one issue approach for why tourists are bad.
Tourist Season is full of dark humor that still resonates today.
In the beginning.
Carl Hiaasen is a very talented writer. He knows how to craft stories that are delightfully over-the-top, genuinely funny and cynical to the nth degree. Tourist Season is an early Hiaasen novel about a rag-tag group of American terrorists who hope to restore Florida to its former glory by driving out all the tourists, snowbirds and retirees. To accomplish this, they go on a killing rampage which they have convinced themselves will lead to a mass exodus from the Sunshine State.
Brian Keyes, a former newspaper reporter turned private eye, and Al Garcia, a Miami police sergeant, are charged with stopping the terrorists' nefarious scheme.
Those readers familiar with Hiassen's later work know that he has the habit of killing off characters in some very original and gruesome ways. Most of the time, the victims of these cruel deaths are miscreants who presumably deserve their horrible fates. Because of this, readers are not turned off by the cruelty and can even appreciate the dark humor inherent in the ghastly acts Hiaasen describes. Unfortunately, when Tourist Season was written, Hiaasen had not yet learned that repeatedly subjecting perfectly innocent characters to cruel and inhuman punishment was likely to turn off many readers and that is the book's major flaw. The first part of Tourist Season contains several instances of innocent tourists and others meeting some very violent and grotesque deaths. I for one, did not find this portion of the narrative to be particularly funny.
The latter parts of Tourist Season are, however, much more enjoyable. Plenty of over-the-top action, some pricelessly cynical commentary and a few clever plot twists bring the proceedings to a satisfying conclusion.
Though slightly flawed, Tourist Season is a well written satiric novel which succeeds in showcasing Carl Hiaasen's prodigious talent. Four stars.
Get everything he writes!
This is the first of the Hiaasen books with his character, Skink. Once you meet Skink, you will need to read all of the books with him in it. Read them in order as it's fun to watch the characters develop. I reread them often.
A little darker than usual, but still good for some laughs
This is the third Carl Hiaasen book that I have read, and it stays pretty close to his usual formula of an unlikely hero trying to save Florida from some dangerously wacky criminals. It's an entertaining read with plenty of vintage Hiaasen humor predicated on the plausible lunacy of the Floridian race. The subject of the rape of the Everglades is pretty close to his heart, and the subtext of the book seems a little angrier than the others that I have read. In this book, he seems to have a lot of sympathy for the villain because he is murdering tourists and that's actually kind of OK. I did enjoy the book overall, and would recommend it to anyone who has never read one of Hiaasen's books, albeit not as strongly as Skin Tight or Stormy Weather.
(87 reviews)
