Three star review, originally posted here on July 18th, 2025.
I can’t remember how this book came across my radar, as I am outside my genre here. I’ve barely read any YA books as an adult, and so I’m not the target audience. But it looked like a fun time, and sometimes you need something lighthearted and silly, much like Diary of a Wimpy Kid (which I love.) This book was on its way to being just what it needed to be. It has a great opening line about a frozen iguana falling from a tree, and we immediately get sucked into a fascinating world of Florida Man wildlife wranglers. As someone who used to watch Bear Grylls obsessively (he’s on my List of 5, if you know what I mean), I appreciated all of the humor surrounding the faux survivalist and his battle of scripted adventure versus natural reality. There wasn’t anything super amazing here, but I chuckled a handful of times, and for the most part it was fine.
But overall this book just didn’t work for me, and I think it all went downhill when a violent villain suddenly shows up towards the end of the book to set up our dramatic climax. Our villain is a drunken gun-wielding child-abuser who has arrived on our kooky set to fetch his runaway daughter. He shoots people. He’s drunk as fuck. He’s an abhorrent, terrifying monster. Tonally this character is just a disconnect from the rest of the book. He’s just too serious of a character committing too violent of a transgression to fit into this fun tale about a spoiled TV star squaring off against an alligator wrangler. The plot also gets painfully boring at this point. All of the animal stuff was so fun! But now we’re just hiding from a lunatic with a gun as a side character is slowly bleeding to death, and the last chapters feel like they stretch out forever as nothing really happens.
That being said, I liked the wackiness of the TV star losing his mind, running off into the wilderness, and thinking he’s a vampire. That’s solid kid humor right there.
Helga without the H 