I’d better get a library card because I’m checking out of this relationship.

I have a confession to make. I only read 223 pages of this book. I know, I know. I said I was going to turn over a new leaf and then only review books I had finished so why am I writing this one? Well, I was pretty amused by the first 223 pages until suddenly I would rather cut my arm off with a surgical saw, beat it with a baseball bat and leave it in shallow ocean waters to be masticated upon by zebra sharks than finish the remaining ninety-four pages. It happens.

Let’s put it in an analogy of a first date. I agreed to go out with this book because it’s from Florida and so am I. We could understand each other. It says jokes like, “Key West is a drinking village with a little bit of a fishing problem.” I say jokes like “What’s the difference between a porcupine and a Porsche? Porsches have their pricks on the inside. ” Yancy (the main character) keeps a severed arm in his freezer in between popsicles and frozen crab cakes. I found a dead body in a canal in Fort Lauderdale when I was in middle school…so it seems like we might get along, and for a while we do.

I am amused as Yancy tries to keep anyone from buying the hideous McMansion under construction next door to him by breaking into the house before it is about to be shown and putting a dead raccoon in the master bedroom and when that doesn’t work: a beehive, a satanic altar, a psychologically disturbed couple camping in a tent, and his own naked trembling body after half of his buttocks have been gnawed off. I tell him about the time I too had my buttocks gnawed off as I was visiting my grandpa’s grave with my grandma and a vicious German Shepherd came out of nowhere. Grandma told me that if I didn’t move it wouldn’t bite me, but she was wrong.

But I had some serious incompatibilities with Bad Monkey. For one thing, the brief (thankfully) narrative sections that are related to the title are exaggeratedly and needlessly racist….very much like Book of Mormon, the incredibly interesting and complicated musical by the makers of South Park.

I sat in the front row and was completely blown away at how they had managed to make America think critically about itself by feeling free to judge Mormons and then realize we were actually (correctly) judging ourselves. You know it’s supposed to be making fun of racism while at the same time, it just is needlessly racist with an ongoing joke of the main female character in Uganda who thinks an old typewriter is a cell phone. Have you been to Uganda? You know everyone there speaks English and has a cell phone, right?

That’s how Bad Monkey is. There is a Bahamian voodoo witch known as the Dragon Queen who rides around on her red electric scooter trying to control people with her putrid libidinous charms (his description, not mine) and Hiaasen writes her in dialect, “What de hell’s wrong wit your boy dere? He dont look right.” (p. 52) Do I need to say anything else to convince you?

So it was fun for a few hours, day drinking together in broken plastic lawn chairs, him swilling rum, me, my new quarantine drink of choice, Lemon Crystal Lite and Vodka, but in the end, I did choose to say I needed to use the restroom and crawled out the bathroom window to escape.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t go out with him. I mean, the man’s written 25 other books so somebody is finishing them. It just ain’t gonna be me, mon.