Review: Jurassic, Florida

Jurassic, Florida by Hunter Shea
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Polo Springs, Florida, already beset by a hurricane, is overrun by iguanas! Will anyone survive?

Hunter Shea is one of my favorite authors so this one was a no-brainer when I saw it on Netgalley. If it wasn't so short, I probably wouldn't have finished it.

It may be that I've read too many Hunter Shea books or I'm suffering from creature feature fatigue but I was pretty underwhelmed by this one. The first thing that made me roll my eyes was the mayor, an eighteen year old girl. I'm sure there are some eighteen year old girls out there that could run a small Florida town but I don't think a book about ravenous iguanas of unusual size rampaging a town is a good place for one. I didn't really care about Don, Barbara, and their kid, or the mobster in exile. The lesbian couple, Cheryl and Nicole, were easily my favorite characters. I found them way more interesting and likeable than the rest of the cast.

The action picked up in the second half but niggling things about the first half hampered my enjoyment. People made stupid decisions to advance the plot and the prose was a little on the lazy side of things. The action and the gore kept this from being a one. Surprisingly, I did not get tired of descriptions of lizards gnawing on people.

And that's that. I think I'm going on a creature feature break for a while. Two out of five stars.

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