The first character we meet is Keith Rosen, the meanest boy in Verity, who has been suspended from school again – his mother doesn’t know yet. Girls run away from home, babies cry all night, ficus hedges explode into flame, and during one particularly awful May, half a dozen rattlesnakes set themselves up in the phone booth outside the 7-Eleven and refused to budge until June. At least one teenage boy comes close to slamming his car right into the gumbo-limbo tree that grows beside the Burger King. Every May, when the sea turtles begin their migration across West Main Street, mistaking the glow of streetlights for the moon, people go a little bit crazy.
It isn’t the humidity, or even the heat, which is so fierce and sudden it can make grown men cry.
People in Verity like to talk, but the one thing they neglect to mention to outsiders is that something is wrong with the month of May. Turtle Moon is set during the month of May in the eastern Florida town of Verity, a sweltering and extremely humid region bounded by swamp. He is there for his still grieving older brother rather than anything else though. Turtle Moon does feature an angel – a ghost – little brother of one of the main characters, trapped in the tree where he died in a car crash.
Most of her novels tend to feature ordinary people put into stressful or difficult situations and we see the reactions of the world around them, but she also often inserts just a little magic realism, which let me reassure those of you who may be put off by it, is often more of an extrasensory feel, rather than anything overtly fantastic. Hoffman is a prolific but always enjoyable author – I’ve read several others by her: her debut Property Of (pre-blog), The Ice Queen (wonderful!), The Story Sisters, The Museum of Extraordinary Things – but not her most famous novel Practical Magic, which was filmed with Nicole Kidman. Urn:isbn:1560544775 Scandate 20100205191602 Scanner theme for our August book had been a random one – ‘Turtle’! There were a few potential choices, including Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary, and Terry Pratchett of course, but the book we finally picked was Alice Hoffman’s 1992 novel Turtle Moon. OL48965W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 93.55 Pages 314 Ppi 400 Related-external-id urn:isbn:1440666911 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 21:19:03 Boxid IA109904 Boxid_2 CH101001 Camera Canon 5D City New York Containerid_2 X0001 Donor
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