Divorced single mothers often move to small town Florida, but none of them are aware like the local population, that the moon in March will make crazy things happen. The turtle moon can make the meanest teenaged boy in town run away with a baby to keep her safe. It can make a mother brave enough to investigate a murder to clear her sons name, and it can make a hardened K9 policeman fall in love with her.

In some ways, this book is a novel about a murder of a mother, and a teenage kid who gets mixed up in it when he instinctively runs away with the woman’s baby to protect it. But like all Hoffman novels, it’s about how the effects of events ripple outwards and change people, how they can effect a whole small town. And it also has the magic realism that makes her stories so much more than just a another novel. Her characters must grow through their pasts and face things in order to resolve things, not simply solve a crime. Although that is part of it too.

This book is sweet, sad, melancholy and delicious.

Read It If: you were ever the child of divorced parents or ever felt the call of the moon in March.