"Turtle Moon" by Alice Hoffman

OK I think that perhaps I might had enough of Alice Hoffman for some time - for whatever reason, I gulped five of her novels in a row and although she is gifted, warm, entertaining and perceptive author, the obvious similarity between her work started to feel just a bit tiring. There's absolutely no doubt that in the future I will return to the rest of her books and it might be with a great pleasure, but its better to move on before this relationship turns completely sour. As I already noted earlier, Hoffman operates in a certain comfort zone (women, mothers, daughters, kitchen, cooking, dogs, lusty men, dangerous men, occasional magic) which of course its not bad in itself - it is her own style, after all and we love her for that - but at this point I kind of lost the excitement about her books and need to move on to something completely different.

It starts very good - Hoffman's prose is delightful, witty and completely seductive. Take for instance this example: "Charles Verity swore he would live forever. Every night he drank a bitter tea made from the bark of the paradise tree to ensure his good health, but as it turned out he was eaten by an alligator up by the pond where the municipal golf course was later built." How delightful and what a quirky sense of humour! There is also a typically Hoffmanesque long-winded descriptions of nature, mothers, daughters, dogs and even relatively suspenseful plot that appears as lifted from a 1955. Robert Mitchum movie "The Night of the Hunter" (with a good hearted old lady collecting orphans all over the place). Somewhere halfway trough, "Turtle Moon" suddenly loses the focus and the main female character succumbs to very typical Hoffman trait, metamorphosing into sex crazed zombie who completely forgets what exactly she was supposed to do (and in all honesty, why would she care, as she never did previously). This is something Hoffman often does, creating heroines who get so swept into thunderous passion that they stop eating, washing, living, breathing. Oh-my-teenage-son-is-missing-and-perhaps-he's-dead-but-never-mind-here-is-a-nice-sexy-police-detective. Coming straight from "Practical Magic", "Here on Earth" and "The Probable Future", this is the fourth Alice Hoffman novel that has this intriguing premise and no amount of elaborate nature descriptions can disguise it. It actually gets amusing after a while.