In the following excerpt, Magrs explains why he feels that the moral lesson on Hoot takes away from its fun.
The best children's books always have hopeless, hapless, ineffectual adults in them. There's an anarchy in really good children's fiction that comes from putting the well-balanced, badly behaved child characters at the centre, making sense of a world that the grown-ups have mismanaged. Crime writer Carl Hiaasen's first novel for children, Hoot, is no exception. We've got lumbering, beer-guzzling, white-trash parents; useless policemen who get fooled into thinking it's still night because someone has painted their car windows black; and heads of multinational fast-food companies who think nothing of crushing the nests of cute burrowing owls.
Cute burrowing owls. That's what the book's really about. Which is a shame, because I was enjoying all of the.....
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