Meet twenty-two-year-old Cherry Pye (née Cheryl Bunterman), a pop star since she was fourteen—and about to attempt a comeback from her latest drug-and-alcohol disaster.
Now meet Cherry again: in the person of her “undercover stunt double,” Ann DeLusia. Ann portrays Cherry whenever the singer is too “indisposed”—meaning wasted—to go out in public. And it is Ann-mistaken-for-Cherry who is kidnapped from a South Beach hotel by obsessed paparazzo Bang Abbott.
Now the challenge for Cherry’s handlers (über–stage mother; horndog record producer; nipped, tucked, and Botoxed twin publicists; weed whacker–wielding bodyguard) is to rescue Ann while keeping her existence a secret from Cherry’s public—and from Cherry herself.
The situation is more complicated than they know. Ann has had a bewitching encounter with Skink—the unhinged former governor of Florida living wild in a mangrove swamp—and now he’s heading for Miami to find her . . .
Will Bang Abbott achieve his fantasy of a lucrative private photo session with Cherry Pye? Will Cherry sober up in time to lip-synch her way through her concert tour? Will Skink track down Ann DeLusia before Cherry’s motley posse does?
All will be revealed in this hilarious spin on life in the celebrity fast lane.
There is precious little innocence in Carl Hiaasen's moral universe, muses the Washington Post, "only gradients of venality." Longtime admirers of Hiaasen's fiction will relish the wicked wit, fast-moving plot, and delightfully odious cast of characters in this satirical send-up of celebrity culture. However, some critics found Hiaasen's subject matter passé in the wake of the latest entertainment industry scandals, and one objected to contrived characters and plot developments. Despite their complaints, reviewers generally enjoyed Star Island, and readers will also laugh at Hiaasen's "latest celebration of the grotesques and morally ambiguous citizens of his native Florida" (San Francisco Chronicle), even if the novel doesn't rate as one of his best.
Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives with his incredibly tolerant family and numerous personal demons.
A graduate of the University of Florida, at age 23 he joined The Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the paper's weekly magazine and later its prize-winning investigations team. Since 1985 Hiaasen has been writing a regular column, which at one time or another has pissed off just about everybody in South Florida, including his own bosses. He has outlasted almost all of them, and his column still appears on most Sundays in The Herald's opinion-and-editorial section. It may be viewed online at www.miamiherald.com or in the actual printed edition of the newspaper, which, miraculously, is still being published.
For his journalism and commentary, Hiaasen has received numerous state and national honors, including the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club. His work has also appeared in many well-known magazines, including Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Time, Life, Esquire and, most improbably, Gourmet.
In the early 1980s, Hiaasen began writing novels with his good friend and distinguished journalist, the late William D. Montalbano. Together they produced three mystery thrillers -- Powder Burn, Trap Line and Double Whammy -- which borrowed heavily from their own reporting experiences.
Tourist Season, published in 1986, was Hiaasen's first solo novel. GQ magazine called it "one of the 10 best destination reads of all time," although it failed to frighten a single tourist away from Florida, as Hiaasen had hoped it might. His next effort, Double Whammy, was the first (and possibly the only) novel about sex, murder and corruption on the professional bass-fishing circuit.
Since then, Hiaasen has published nine others -- Skin Tight, Native Tongue, Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, Lucky You, Sick Puppy, Basket Case, Skinny Dip, The Downhill Lie and Nature Girl. Hiaasen made his children's book debut with Hoot (2002), which was awarded a Newbery Honor and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller lists. For young readers he went on to write the bestselling Flush (2005) and, most recently Scat (January 2009). The film version of Hoot was released in 2006, directed by Wil Shriner and produced by Jimmy Buffett and Frank Marshall. ("Hoot" is now available on DVD).
Hiaasen is also responsible for Team Rodent (1998), a wry but unsparing rant against the Disney empire and its creeping grip on the American entertainment culture. In 2008, Hiaasen came back to nonfiction with The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport. The book chronicles his harrowing and ill-advised reacquaintance with golf after a peaceful, 32-year absence.
Together, Hiaasen's novels have been published in 34 languages, which is 33 more than he is able to read or write. Still, he has reason to believe that all the foreign translations are brilliantly faithful to the original work. The London Observer has called him "America's finest satirical novelist," while Janet Maslin of the New York Times has compared him to Preston Sturges, Woody Allen and S.J. Perelman. Hiaasen re-reads those particular reviews no more than eight or nine times a day.
To prove that he doesn't just make up all the sick stuff in his fiction, Hiaasen has also published two collections of his newspaper columns, Kick A** and Paradise Screwed, both courageously edited by Diane Stevenson and faithfully kept in print by the University Press of Florida.
One of Hiaasen's previous novels, Strip Tease, became a major motion-picture in 1996 starring Demi Moore, and directed by Andrew Bergman. Despite what some critics said, Hiaasen continues to insist that the scene featuring Burt Reynolds slathered from his neck to his toes with Vaseline is one of the high points in modern American cinema.
The wacky and wonderful Carl Hiaasen returns to his Florida stomping grounds for his latest comic caper "Star Island." Loading the novel and his characters with the over-the-top eccentricities you might expect from such a warped mind (no offense Carl--you're my kind of guy)--Hiaasen uses his signature style to brutally satirize the notion of celebrity in an era of sleazy tabloid journalism. It's an easy target--to be sure--maybe too easy and familiar. But Hiaasen can spin a tale and "Star Island" is a repugnantly entertaining romp even if you wish Hiaasen would have set his sights a bit higher!
Cherry Pye epitomizes everything that is disturbing about modern celebrity. With a lack of talent, but backed by an ambitious team, Cherry has risen to teenage stardom despite an obliviousness to her surroundings. Keeping Cherry's image somewhat intact amidst rampant promiscuity and drug use is a full time job for an entire entourage of handlers. With self-promoting parents, a pair of publicists surgically enhanced to appear identical, a desperate record label executive, a wannabe boyfriend, a stand-in to handle social events when Cherry is incapacitated, and a new body guard with a weed whacker in place of an arm--Hiaasen has compiled enough hilariously repellant characters to fill several novels! Add a corpulent paparazzo who's practically stalking Cherry to her death and an ex-politician who has turned into a rogue environmental terrorist and "Star Island" is overflowing with local color!
I think the primary criticism that some readers might have with "Star Island" is its lack of a real heart--none of the characters proves to be an identifiable protagonist. Cherry's double Ann is positioned as the piece's true hero (many characters instantly love and/or admire her), but her sarcasm isn't particularly heart-warming and she's riding the same opportunistic train that every one else is. Don't get me wrong, I liked Ann fine--I just don't think she served exactly the role Hiaasen set her up for. To be fair, "Star Island" is no "up-with-people" feel good hit, though. It is the grotesque underbelly of stardom and the parasites that feed off of it. And that works for me--I like that sort of thing! I plowed through "Star Island"--it is good and dirty fun!
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Typical Hiaasen fare for those familiar with his earlier work. You get your fill of satyrical South Florida situations and cartoonish characters that are worth an occasional chuckle. The narrative is fast-paced and inventive as ever and the dialogue is spot-on for the tone of the novel.
What ultimately disappointed me was its shallowness. Hiaasen throws in the usual cast of weirdos along with his pet villains, land developers, who are superfluous to the story and just exist to establish Skink in it in his most improbable of interventions.
At the end, not even the characters seem to know how to wrap up this story, so it just kind of fizzles out, and all the loose ends receive neat little one-paragraph tourniquets akin to those "what happened to..." titles in the final credits of some movies.
Cardboard characters and a muddy ending. Not his best work by far.
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I'm a huge fan and pre-ordered this book based on my love of previous Carl Hiaasen books and what I thought was a can't miss premise. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
The thing I loved about the author's previous novels was that even though the characters were bizarre - they had a depth and an underlying humanity that made them vibrant. That is completely lacking in this book. Even the 'cameo' characters from previous books seem like caricatures of themselves.
Overall, I found myself grinding through pages to get to the thrown together finale. I also thought that the epilogue was perfunctory.
Here's hoping that Mr. Hiaasen can rediscover some of the magic that made him one of my favorite authors in the past.
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