Fun fact: the iguanas of Key West have the somewhat sacrilegious habit of not only living in the town’s historic cemetery but using its gravestones as toilets. Profligate in their daily constitutional, their droppings create a visual and olfactory residue that some take as an offense to both the living and the dead. This real-life dilemma is the concern of the fictional protagonist of Carl Hiaasen’s upcoming middle-grade novel Wrecker, centered on 15-year-old Valdez Jones VIII, who is hired to hose down a single grave each week, keeping it free of the unwelcome deposits. In the process of doing so, he discovers some disturbing history about the place he calls home, gets caught up in shady dealings, and makes a new friend. Perhaps only Hiaasen could join these elements together into a timely, entertaining, adventurous, and heartfelt yarn as he does in his first middle grade novel in five years, due out from Knopf Books for Young Readers on September 26. Wrecker’s cover is revealed here for the first time.
Valdez comes from a long line of wreckers (divers who retrieve salvage cargo from sunken ships) that started with his Bahamian ancestor who arrived on Key West in the 19th century. The teen is proud of this aspect of his family heritage, adopting the nickname Wrecker and continuing the legacy of a life spent on the water. Taking his skiff out is a way to get away from it all—school (online because of the pandemic), his well-meaning but annoying stepfather and plastic surgery-obsessed mother, and the pressures of teen life, including social media, which he eschews completely. He’s as at home on a boat as on land and knows his way in and out of Key West’s many channels and islands. Wrecker lives with his older stepsister Suzanne, an environmental activist who gives him both the independence and love that he needs. But he’s still ambivalent about his absentee father Valdez Jones VII, a would-be singer-songwriter who hasn’t been seen since he took off for Nashville and changed his name to Austin Breakwater.
Like all of Hiaasen’s young protagonists, Wrecker is a self-sufficient, wise-for-his-years kid surrounded by (mostly) feckless, incompetent, and often corrupt adults. So is his newfound friend, the skateboarding cool girl Willi Brown. While environmental issues are always a main theme of Hiaasen’s books for young people, Wrecker gives equal attention to Key West’s troubling history of racial injustice by highlighting the story of Manuel Cabeza, a man who was lynched by KKK members in 1921 because of his relationship with a woman of color. As his sister organizes locals to stop giant polluting cruise ships from docking at the port, Wrecker, who is biracial, begins to challenge his long-held assumption that the town where he grew up has always been harmoniously diverse.
Hiaasen said he began visiting Key West in the ’80s when he was covering crime as a reporter for the Miami Herald and it has become one of his favorite places in the state he’s known for chronicling so well, with all its fascination and foibles. This laid-back and quirky corner of the Sunshine State has been “a smuggler’s paradise for over a century,” he told PW. “All that changes is the cargo.” While spending time there during the height of the pandemic, he realized that because smugglers always find new ways to adapt, there were timely stories to explore, from the opportunistic fraudsters taking advantage of the crisis to the suffering of families with loved ones who were hospitalized. The beautiful Key West cemetery turned out to be an ideal setting for a number of elements of the story, offering cover for smugglers, but also access to history for the characters through Cabeza’s gravestone.
In addition to the pressures of the outside world, Wrecker is confronting the choices of his absent father and flighty mother. “In a sense, he’s been on his own,” Hiaasen said. While these circumstances might turn a character into an angry loner in the hands of another author, Hiaasen celebrates his characters’ independence. “One of the things I wanted to show was that if you are a kid growing up in a place like Key West, you can get in your boat and get away from anything. It’s an exhilarating, instant escape,” he said. “I wrote the story as much for the kids who have that kind of life as for those who haven’t.”
Wrecker has its villains too, foremost among them a sinister character known only as Silver Mustache until the end of the book. “It’s kind of a cliché,” he said. “But the bad guys are more fun to write.” And in Key West, he added, “there’s always been a colorful cast of true-life renegades.”
Wrecker is Hiaasen’s seventh book for young readers. His debut, Hoot (2002), won a Newbery Honor and all have been bestsellers. With Wrecker, said his editor, Nancy Siscoe, editorial director at Knopf, “Carl has given us another timely, trenchant, bitingly funny romp through tropical paradise. He never sugarcoats things for his young audience—there are crooks and schemers aplenty. But he also features characters who care, who fight the good fight for justice. And in classic Hiaasen style, the bad guys get what’s coming to them in outrageously satisfying ways.”
Knopf executive art director April Ward and senior designer Michelle Cunningham worked on Wrecker’s cover concept. “We love the whimsical look of the original covers that were created by artist Brad Woodard and hand-lettered by Mike Burroughs,” Ward said. The book’s title inspired them to stay within the spirit of the previous covers, but take the concept a bit further with the speed boat breaking through with the text. “The little fish swimming around the bottom of the title are a nod to the cover of Flush,” she added. “So many talented people have worked together to come up with this new look for Carl Hiaasen, and we hope that kids will love it as much as we do.”
