Chomp
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3.9 • 15 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this hysterical #1 New York Times bestseller, one kid has to wrangle gators, snakes, bats that bite, and a reality show host gone rogue! This is Carl Hiaasen's Florida—where the creatures are wild and the people are wilder!
When Wahoo Cray’s dad—a professional animal wrangler—takes a job with a reality TV show called Expedition Survival!, Wahoo figures he'll have to do a bit of wrangling himself to keep his father from killing Derek Badger, the show's inept and egotistical star. But the job keeps getting more complicated: Derek Badger insists on using wild animals for his stunts; and Wahoo's acquired a shadow named Tuna—a girl who's sporting a shiner courtesy of her father and needs a place to hide out.
They've only been on location in the Everglades for a day before Derek gets bitten by a bat and goes missing in a storm. Search parties head out and promptly get lost themselves. And then Tuna's dad shows up with a gun . . .
It's anyone's guess who will actually survive Expedition Survival. . .
“Only in Florida—and in the fiction of its native son Carl Hiaasen—does a dead iguana fall from a palm tree and kill somebody.” —New York Post
“Chomp is a delightful laugh-out-loud sendup of the surreality of TV that will be enjoyed by readers of all ages.” —Los Angeles Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hiaasen extends his brand of Florida eco-adventures with this loopy foray into reality TV. Derek Badger, star of Expedition Survival!, arrives to film an Everglades episode, enlisting the services of animal wrangler Mickey Cray, a sort of Dr. Doolittle who specializes in snakes and keeps a 12-foot-long gator named Alice as a pet. Mickey holds his nose but takes the job, assisted by his son, Wahoo, a goodhearted teenager who's able to handle his father as well as his father handles pythons. Badger, naturally, is a complete fraud, who choppers off to a hotel each evening while mosquitoes dine on his crew. After filming starts, Badger gets lost in the swamp with only his (dim) wits to help him survive. There are no cute owls or endangered panthers to save tension derives from wondering whether Badger will get himself killed before Mickey does it for him, and a subplot about Wahoo's friend Tuna, who's on the run from her abusive father. Not as tightly constructed as Hoot and tamer than Flush, but still pretty hilarious. Ages 10 up.
