Carl Hiaasen. Skink—No Surrender. New York: Knopf, 2014. Print.

Carl Hiaasen writes funny adventure stories, some for kids, some for adults. Skink—No Surrender is his latest young adult (YA) book whose title comes from a character in some of his grown-up novels—former Florida governor Clinton Tyree, a.k.a. Skink.

At its core Skink—No Surrender is a cautionary tale for gullible people who might be thinking they have found an online soul mate who is, in fact, a predator.

Though with a serious message, the novel is lively and humorous. First person narrator Richard tends to see things with the irony of a kid in his early teens. While he might pretend to be tough or carefree, the people he loves are important to him.

And that includes his cousin Malley, a girl who thinks she has things figured out and thinks that her parents are far too strict. Though clearly foolish for going to secretly meet he online “friend,” Malley is book smart. She is able to effectively communicate where she is with her cousin.

Richard tracks her down with the help of the truly wacky Skink, whom he first meets when he sees a straw sticking out of a turtle egg mound on a beach near his Florida home. It is no turtle egg mound after all, but the scraggly Skink has disguised his sandy hiding place to look like one.

Even though ex-governor Tyree was reported dead a few years ago, he lives on, hiding in beaches and swamps as he did in Vietnam, still seeking justice. The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker symbolizes him. It is declared extinct, but people still claim to see it in Florida bottomlands. There are a few twists to this story. It seems more than once that the story is coming to a conclusion when—another surprise! Skink—No Surrender is a wild story set in the wild, the wild which we know from Hoot, Chomp, and other books that Hiaasen loves.