Why Hoot? Why not Burrowing Owls? Or The Epic Adventures of Roy and Mullet Fingers? Why should we even give a hoot about the title?
Oooh—we get it now.
The title not only refers to the adorable noise that owls make, it's telling us to actually care about them. First Mullet Fingers gets Roy to care. And Roy gets his father to care. And then he gets his classmates and friends to care. And somewhere in all the excitement of glittering snakes and mullet catching, we start to care.
Everyone ends up giving a hoot about those little burrowing owls.
Hoot also starts the ball rolling with the one-word titles for Carl Hiaasen's other young adult books. Flush tackles sewage dumping, Scat mixes a panther and a missing teacher, and Chomp dives into reality TV. The one-word theme was actually done intentionally by Hiaasen. In an exclusive Q&A with Amazon.com, Hiaasen reveals that he chose this format to indicate to parents that the book is YA. (Source)