Chomp is one of Carl Hiaasen’s Young Adult novels. After Wahoo Cray’s dad, a wildlife wrangler, who owns a collection of dangerous animals, gets hit on the head by a falling, frozen iguana and is out of work, the family finds itself in a financial crisis. So, when an offer to make easy money comes in from a reality TV show, Wahoo signs him and his father up for the job.

It turns out the survivalist in the show, Derek Badger, can only survive on room service and stunt doubles, so when he insists on going into the wild for real, things certainly get wild for Wahoo and his father.

Chomp is as entertainingly zany as any of Hiaasen’s novels, but being a young adult novel, there’s no adult behavior.

— FloridaFiction.com editor

In this hysterical #1 New York Times bestseller, one kid has to wrangle gators, snakes, bats that bite, and a reality show host gone rogue! This is Carl Hiaasen’s Florida—where the creatures are wild and the people are wilder! 

When Wahoo Cray’s dad—a professional animal wrangler—takes a job with a reality TV show called Expedition Survival!, Wahoo figures he’ll have to do a bit of wrangling himself to keep his father from killing Derek Badger, the show’s inept and egotistical star. But the job keeps getting more complicated: Derek Badger insists on using wild animals for his stunts; and Wahoo’s acquired a shadow named Tuna—a girl who’s sporting a shiner courtesy of her father and needs a place to hide out. 

They’ve only been on location in the Everglades for a day before Derek gets bitten by a bat and goes missing in a storm. Search parties head out and promptly get lost themselves. And then Tuna’s dad shows up with a gun . . .

It’s anyone’s guess who will actually survive Expedition Survival. . .