Book Review: Razor Girl, by Carl Hiaasen (2016)

Paperback cover of Razor Girl, by Carl Hiaasen, 2016.

Author Carl Hiaasen.

Carl Hiaasen has been on my list of “authors I should read” for a while now. I’ve seen his books in stores for years, and they’ve always stuck out, thanks to their eye-catching covers. Years ago I saw Hiaasen interviewed on The Colbert Report and I was struck by his humor. So I finally cracked open a Hiaasen novel this summer. 

Razor Girl, published in 2016, is Hiaasen’s most recent novel, and the second of his books to feature Andrew Yancy as the main character. The cast of Razor Girl is made up of assorted loonies and miscreants, ranging from the titular character Merry Mansfield to Martin Trebeaux, who owns a company that replaces sand on Florida’s beaches, and Buck Nance, the star of a trashy reality TV show. 

There’s no shortage of topics for Hiaasen to satirize in Razor Girl, and his prose keeps the novel humming along smoothly. There are plenty of laughs to be found. One of my own favorite lines was about two transplants to Key West: “At first they were distrusted because of their sobriety and competence, but in time the locals accepted them.” (p.22) 

I’ll forgo a detailed plot summary, since it is quite Byzantine, and just tell you that I enjoyed reading Razor Girl. However, the novel does tend to lose a bit of steam during the last third, as it takes the various strains of the plot a long time to wind down and wrap up. 

My one annoyance with the characters in Razor Girl was how every female character seems to find Andrew Yancy super attractive. I don’t recall Yancy ever being described as especially attractive, but even if he looked like Cary Grant, it’s stretching it to think every woman would be so interested in him. To wit: there’s Yancy’s girlfriend, Dr. Rosa Campesino, although she quickly leaves South Florida for Norway. There’s Merry Mansfield, who starts telling Andrew they will never sleep together as soon as they meet, which, of course, inevitably means that they will sleep together. (I think this rule is related to Anton Chekhov’s saying about not having a loaded gun on stage unless it will be fired.) There’s also Deb, whose fiancée wants to build a home on the empty lot next door to Yancy’s house. Deb loses her engagement ring somewhere on the property, and offers Yancy a blow job if he’ll help her find it. Perhaps offering random strangers oral sex may be de rigueur among neighbors in Key West, but it struck me as a pretty unlikely occurrence.

That being said, I’d still recommend Razor Girl as an entertaining romp, a perfect summer read that will give you some laughs.