YMMV / Star Island

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The narration never gives a satisfactory explanation - or even a satisfactory pretext - for why Cherry decides to join the Mile-High Club with Bang Abbott. Asked later, the best Cherry can do is to say she felt sorry for him, "plus he had the hottest Orange BlackBerry!" Cherry's airborne seduction provides much of the fuel for Bang Abbott's obsession with Cherry that leads to his kidnap attempt, but even after he has gotten over this obsession, neither he nor the reader are any closer to understanding why she seduced him in the first place. Possible explanations may include:
  • Cherry's backstory indicates that she has been taught to flaunt and use her sexual appeal to advance her career whenever possible, so for her sex is a natural reflex, even with someone as odious as Abbott, who has nothing to offer her career.
  • Cherry is such a ditz that for her, sex is a much less taxing way to pass time than conversation.
  • Cherry is a confirmed narcissist who never fails to get a charge out of proving that men (even overweight, unwashed men) find her sexy.
  • Cherry honestly believes in her own stardom, and feels that "gifting" herself to one of the unwashed masses is some kind of divine grace.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Cherry's father, Ned, warns his wife that Cherry's Alcohol-Induced Idiocy has already become more famous than her music, and is on the verge of wrecking her career permanently: "look what happened to Amy Winehouse, and that girl can carry a tune." Winehouse died of a drug overdose in July 2011, almost exactly a year after the novel was published.
• Pandering to the Base: Invoked by Carl Hiaasen, both in the novel and in interviews about it; he frequently excoriates the media, including his own newspaper, for pandering to the public's appetite for celebrity "news":
  The smelly stuff that was once left to the capable vultures at the Star and the Enquirer is now front-page fodder in your hometown newspaper and the lead story on the six o'clock news.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Much of the plot's drama results from Bang Abbott obsessing over the sheer improbability of a "major female recording artist" deciding to have sex (even "frivolously empty" sex) with a paparazzo - "the social chasm between parasite and host was considered impassable - like a butterfly humping a cockroach." However, in 2008 (two years before the novel's publication), Britney Spears had made headlines for dating...
• Take That!: Abbott, recalling the last days of his career as a newspaper photographer, when he was in trouble for staging the shark attack that won him a Pulitzer Prize:
  It was during that dark and turbulent period when the Times sent Bang Abbott to shoot a Hannah Montana concert in Tampa, an assignment he'd correctly perceived as punitive.

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