Turtle Diary

Turtle Diary has been a favorite book of so many people in my life—and I love Hoban's Frances and Captain Najork books so preposterously much—that I half-felt like I had read it already myself, but, until this month, that was not actually the case. I expected a wry and quiet tale of two lonely people who decide to do something oddly momentous (free sea turtles from a London aquarium), and that is indeed what I got, but no summary and no second-hand report can do justice to the specific strangeness, the specific sadness, and the specific joy of their small adventure, which manages to be thrillingly life-changing and crushingly anticlimactic, all at once. Fans of the modest charms of recent Phinney favorite Leonard and Hungry Paul should pick this up pronto, but expect a few more prickles.