In Gator Country,
science and nature journalist, Rebecca
Renner delivers an astounding story about an alligator-poaching operation
in the Florida Everglades. She grew up in Florida, the “swampy deep south,” one
of the most bio diverse places in the country. At the age of seven, she
encountered her first alligator up close behind her family’s home. By 2017, Renner was working to
support herself as a high school English teacher when a student had turned in a
well-informed, intimate wildlife essay on poaching--“the active illegally
taking or flora or fauna from the wild”--and profiting from it. The student feared
Renner might snitch on him, and this planted a seed in Renner.
Years later, when she was working her way up the ranks as
a nature writer for National Geographic and The New York Times, Renner’s interest in poaching
resurfaced. In 2020, she became determined to learn more about alligator
poaching from the points of view of the law and the poachers--those whom she
identified as the economically poor, struggling to live in Florida’s diminishing
wetlands. Her adventurous, in-depth study probes the nature of crime and human
character, while also mining the far-reaching consequences of what it truly
takes to survive—in the wild and in society.
Renner (Drift:
Collected Short Fiction), a gifted and deeply empathetic
writer, paints such sympathetic, well-rounded portraits of the justice-seeking
rangers and wildlife officers versus the struggling-to-survive poachers that
readers will have trouble taking sides. Her propulsive narrative reads as suspensefully as a well-wrought mystery novel as she uncovers an exciting true
story that will educate, enlighten, and enthrall her audience.
Gator
Country: Deception, Danger and Alligators in the Everglades by Rebecca Renner
Flatiron Books
(Macmillan), $29.99 hardcover, 9781250842572, 288 pages
Publishing Date: November 14, 2023
To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE
NOTE: This review is a reprint and is
being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this
review on Shelf
Awareness: Reader's Edition (November
17, 2023), link HERE
To read the longer form of this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (October 2, 2023), link HERE