2020/77: Star Island -- Carl Hiaasen
Wednesday, July 15th, 2020 08:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranth2020/77: Star Island -- Carl Hiaasen
After reading Bad Monkey, I had a craving for more Hiaasen, so purchased and read this. I found it disappointing, though: possibly just because it's a riff on empty celebrity culture rather than a murder mystery, possibly because some of the characters (Skink and Chemo) would be familiar to serious Hiaasen fans but weren't to me, and thus I missed out on the pleasure of meeting them again.
Cherry Pye is a carefully-moulded pop star with unsanitary habits (sex, drugs, booze, and other bad behaviour), a rapacious manager, and a paparazzi stalker with a crush. She is out of control and unreliable -- which is why she also has a stunt double, Ann de Lucia, who is paid to show up and be photographed and keep the Cherry Pye brand alive and kicking. Cherry, of course, knows nothing of Ann: they have never met. But Ann is easily mistaken for Cherry ...
Star Island was amusing in places, and Hiaasen's gift for riffing on detail remains enjoyable: but I really didn't click with this one at all. Which might, after all, just be that I disliked most of the protagonists, and found some of the misogyny (characters', not author's) slimy, nauseating and far too credible.
Of all the stars who were crashing and burning, Cherry Pye seemed most likely to beat the others to the grave, and for that reason she’d become a focus of Bang Abbott’s morbid scrutiny. Although she was neither as global nor as gifted as Jackson, she was a wild, hot babe and would therefore, in his view, be worth plenty of money dead. [loc. 520]
After reading Bad Monkey, I had a craving for more Hiaasen, so purchased and read this. I found it disappointing, though: possibly just because it's a riff on empty celebrity culture rather than a murder mystery, possibly because some of the characters (Skink and Chemo) would be familiar to serious Hiaasen fans but weren't to me, and thus I missed out on the pleasure of meeting them again.
Cherry Pye is a carefully-moulded pop star with unsanitary habits (sex, drugs, booze, and other bad behaviour), a rapacious manager, and a paparazzi stalker with a crush. She is out of control and unreliable -- which is why she also has a stunt double, Ann de Lucia, who is paid to show up and be photographed and keep the Cherry Pye brand alive and kicking. Cherry, of course, knows nothing of Ann: they have never met. But Ann is easily mistaken for Cherry ...
Star Island was amusing in places, and Hiaasen's gift for riffing on detail remains enjoyable: but I really didn't click with this one at all. Which might, after all, just be that I disliked most of the protagonists, and found some of the misogyny (characters', not author's) slimy, nauseating and far too credible.
