The Nesting Moon

Thirty-one new fables from the beach where five thousand mothers keep the oldest appointment on Earth.

Every night from March to October, on a few miles of Florida sand, loggerhead sea turtles climb out of the Atlantic to bury their eggs - and two moons later the sand opens, and the smallest travelers alive cross the widest beach of their lives toward the light on the water.

The Nesting Moon is the third book of Fables of the Golden Shore, and the one the whole series was walking toward: a nesting season on Juno Beach, told by the animals who live it. A ghost crab who keeps the beach's books. A raccoon who studies a wire cage and learns why it was built. A porch light that argues with a star. An old loggerhead whose shell is a logbook of everywhere she has been. And a hatchling who goes back for his sister - and reaches the wave anyway.

The morals are the kind a grandfather can hand a grandchild: Not everything shaped like food is food. Some fences face outward. Do not promise calm; promise presence. Give the rocket your eyes and the turtle your dark.

Everything the turtles do in this book, turtles truly do. Thirty-three full-page ink plates. A naturalist's afterword, The Real Animals of the Golden Shore, checked against the Loggerhead Marinelife Center's own nest counts and the science behind them. And a closing fable in the author's own voice, from the sliver of Juno Beach outside his front door, on the night a Falcon 9 rose silent in the north while a loggerhead came up the sand and never once looked up.

Written to be read aloud - at night, if you can get away with it. Ages 5-12, and the grown-ups doing the reading. Book 3 of Fables of the Golden Shore, after The Golden Shore and The Storm Season.