LAR'S LIBRARY: MY REVIEW OF CARL HIAASEN'S "FLUSH"

FLUSH. By Carl Hiaasen. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2007. 263 pages.

You might come to Flush with two preconceptions.

Carl Hiaasen writes adult thrillers with a satirical tenor, often featuring characters from the trailer trash end of the social spectrum. So it’s likely that his children’s books will retain a bit of that edge.

Those adult thrillers, and Hiaasen’s books for younger readers, focus on environmentalism, so it’s likely that Flush centers on that kind of issue.

Your preconceptions would be proven true.

The tone of Flush is sardonic. It features a bartender who saves the day named Shelly, who has a "barbed-wire tattoo around one of her biceps," wears "stockings that look like they were made from a mullet net," and actually lives in a trailer park. Not your run-of-the-mill children’s book character.

It’s all about a kid’s battle to help his father stop a casino boat owner from dumping raw sewage in Florida’s coastal waters. Sometimes the message is close to heavy-handed. The bad guys have zero complexity, no redeeming social value.

There is more going on in Flush, however. Wthout making a big deal of it, Hiaasen makes his personable 14-year-old protagonist an accomplished naturalist. Noah knows the names of plants and animals that live where he does—in the Florida Keys. And I mean he really knows them, not just as names he can rattle off. Noah really looks at where he is when he’s outdoors, and notices what he sees.

In our culture, where kids often suffer from what Richard Louv in his Last Child in the Woods called "nature-deficit disorder," Noah makes a nice role model. Although Noah is not afraid of risks, he’s an eminently practical kind of guy, unlike his dad, who is a hothead. Noah gets that practicality from his mother. She married because she loved her impulsive husband, but he goes a little far in his fight to keep the ocean clean. Flush has a lovely subplot—Noah and his stubbornly righteous little sister, Abbey, working together to save their parents’ marriage.

That subplot and Noah’s eye for nature combine with colorful characters and a good dose of action and suspense to endear readers of Flush. I haven’t met a middle schooler who’s read it who wasn’t enthusiastic about the experience. Now I am, too. It’s a sweet little chapter book.

Recommended for fourth graders on up.