Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer Holm – Review

Jennifer Holm is famous for her thick-skinned comic heroine Babymouse, so it is no surprise that Turtle, the eleven-year-old Shirley Temple-hating lead in this story is pretty tough herself.  Turtle is used to life played out at her mother’s whim, so she takes most things in stride and does the best she can with every situation.  It’s 1935, and her mom seems to have an endless supply of dreams and hopes (“all she sees are kittens and roses”) that carry her through a variety of housekeeping jobs, taking Turtle with her from house to house.   Unfortunately, the latest position happens to be with a woman who didn’t expect and really doesn’t like children, so Turtle’s mom sends her from New Jersey to Key West to live with Turtle’s aunt and cousins.  When Turtle arrives in what seems like a foreign land, her aunt doesn’t expect her because she hasn’t received her mother’s letter, and her aunt isn’t prepared for another mouth to feed in her household of boys. 

Turtle quickly finds herself absorbed in everyday life on Curry Street, including a successful babysitting gig carried on by her boy cousins, the shared caretaking of her crabby old grandmother, visits with a gruff writer called Ernest Hemingway at the local bar, and attempts to keep her cat Smokey out of trouble.  Key West is a variety of experiences all at once, with never a dull moment and never a step out of the reality that Turtle is part of so many families trying to make ends meet during a tough time in American history.  She is, it seems, more mature than her mother (“I see things for what they are”) with lower, if any, expectations and a soft spot only for her mother and her cat.  There is a happy ending but it isn’t too happy, which is more believable than her mother’s Hollywood hopes.  Above all else, this story shows how difficulties bring families together and make them stronger, even when it is hard to imagine a light at the end of the tunnel.