Hoot

=**Hoot By Carl Hiaasen**=


 * **Age Range: ** 10 and up
 * **Grade Level: ** 5 and up
 * **Paperback: ** 292 pages
 * **Publisher: ** Yearling; Reprint edition (December 27, 2005)
 * **Language: ** English
 * **ISBN-10: ** 0440419395
 * **ISBN-13: ** 978-0440419396

//Author Biography: //
 Carl Hiassen was born in Florida on March 12, 1953. When he was 23, Hiaasen joined The Miami Herald as a reporter and wrote for the paper's weekly magazine. He later wrote for the prize-winning investigations team. In the 1980's, Carl Hiaasen began writing novels with a friend, William D. Montalbano, and later produced three mysteries together with heavy influence from their reporting days. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Hiaasen's first solo novel was Tourist Season, and it was published in 1986. GQ magazine called it "one of the 10 best destination reads of all time." <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Hiaasen wrote mostly adult novels, but in 2002 he made his debut with children's books writing the novel "Hoot." This book was awarded a Newbery Honor and spent two years on the New York Times Best Seller list.

//Summary//
Hoot tells the story of Roy Eberhardt. Roy just moved to Coconut Cove, Florida. Roy is a very curious boy, and is also bullied by a child named Dana. Throughout the beginning of the novel, Roy sees this boy running along the sidewalk and wonders where he is going and why no one knows who this boy is. There is a construction site for a pancake house being built, but the production keeps getting delayed due to mischievous and successful acts to delay any type of bulldozing. Roy will stop at nothing to try to find this mystery boy. He tries to follow him, but always gets stopped by Dana every chance he gets. Finally, Roy has had enough and punches Dana and escapes the bus. The beginning of the story reveals how immature and childish Roy is and we start to see changes in him as the story progresses. Also in the book, we meet Roy's new friends Garrett and Beatrice. So what makes hoot such a good book? The whole reason behind the mystery boy.The big idea of the book is that the mystery boy, who is called Mullet Fingers, is actually somewhat of a wild boy and he runs every day to the construction site in Coconut Cove to save the Burrow Owls from having their home destroyed. The middle and end of the book centralize around how the town is lying to the townspeople about there being wildlife near the construction site and once they find out that Roy and Mullet Fingers are able to prove it, they become enraged. They boys have saved the owls. Hidden between the lines is a story of growth for Roy. In the novel, he grows from being very immature to being a grown young man who is much smarter and mature than he was when he first came to Coconut Cove.

//Review//
I remember reading Hoot when I was in middle school. I loved the idea of friendships being made in mysterious ways, and I really liked the idea of maturity. Roy was such a dynamic character, and obviously I had not much of a clue what that meant in 6th grade, but I remember loving his journey. Hoot was on my summer reading list and was one of the first long books I actually read fully without the use of spark notes or online summaries to aid me in my understanding of the novel. What I really love about this book is the idea of friendship and how you can find it in more ways than one. Roy and Mullet Fingers became friends because of Roy's curiosity. Making friends is no easy task when you move all the time, and his courage and persistence is what gained him his friends in this book. I would absolutely recommend this book for students who move a lot as well as a book to fit into a lesson in a elementary/early middle school age classroom.

//Analysis of a Lit. Element//
An important element of literacy is to analyze. When we analyze a text, we are able to find the meaning of the novel. In this case, this novel can be argued to be a transformation story. It follows the journey Roy makes to becoming a mature young man who starts to think more about a future that is realistic. When we read books like Hoot, it is important to read between the lines and understand the journeys that the characters go through and understand how they are changing throughout the novel. Analyzing text is also really beneficial to understanding the actual story in front of you. While Hoot is not a difficult story to understand, it can sometimes be a bit more challenging to understand the story line versus what we see on the pages. We may understand what is going on by reading the words on the page, but it isn't until we look more in depth at what the words are saying that we learn what the story and moral are.