Visitation Street

June and Val are bored fifteen-year-old girls on that summer night they decide to take a rubber raft down to the water and float around a bit. They only looking for a bit of adventure, something to occupy their time during that summer that they're too young to join the older teenagers partying and too young to be content with a backyard sleepover, but only one girl will survive their excursion.

This is packaged as a crime novel, but its far more ambitious than that. Set in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, the novel follows several characters who were altered by the night's events, from the girl left alone to be an object of curiosity and gossip, to the man who rescued her, to the owner of a local convenience store hoping to create show more a sense of community out of the very different groups living in the area. Visitation Street examines what makes a neighborhood into a community, and how hard it can be to move forward while living half in the past.

There are too many point-of-view characters for this novel to hold together, but Pochoda has a talent for creating complex, nuanced characters from a variety of backgrounds. I look forward to reading her novels as she progresses as an author. show less

When this book was published two years ago, Red Hook in Brooklyn, NY had not fallen victim to the relentless gentrification of the borough. So now it seems unlikely that a missing white girl in this neighborhood would fall so quickly through the cracks, when fifteen year olds Val and June take an inflatable pink pool raft down to the filthy, polluted Upper Bay on a hot summer night, and only Val returns.

Val and June are, however, the least interesting people in rundown Red Hook, and the books improves greatly when the reader meets Cree, a high school graduate and son of a murdered police officer; Jonathan, a piano bar performer in Manhattan who moonlights as a Red Hook parochial school music teacher; Ren, mentor to Cree, who dazzles the show more blocks with his art from a spray paint can; and Fadi, a bodega owner awaiting the first docking of the Queen Mary in Red Hook.

All these lives intersect and all these lives matter. The characters are all believable and Pochoda sends us deeply, deeply under their collective skins and the surface of this neighborhood on the brink of a cataclysmic attack by the Upwardly Mobiles. show less

Pocoda's debut novel The Art of Disappearing was my #1 read in 2011 so I was more than a little excited to read her newest work. The books are pretty much nothing alike but once I got over that initial disappointment I began to really enjoy Visitation Street.

It is not so much a mystery novel as it is literary fiction with a mystery central to the plot. Two teenage girls take a raft out for a summer night adventure...and one of the girls goes missing. What happened to her is the mystery; how the answer is reached is the literary meat of the book.

The story takes place in Brooklyn in the neighborhood of Red Hook. It's a racially diverse neighborhood - the whites in their middle class homes, the blacks dwelling in the projects, and several show more shopkeepers of various ethnicities providing services to everyone. The author explored the tension that is created by this atmosphere while slowly revealing how and why this is related to the disappearance of June.

Pochada fills the novel with a superb cast of characters - Val, the girl who was with June when she disappeared; Jonathan, the music teacher who rescued Val when she washed up on shore; Cree, the teenager who witnessed Val and June's raft adventure; Fadi, the bodega owner who knows everything about Red Hook; Ren, the artist who mysteriously appears in the neighborhood and befriends Cree. They crash through the novel like pinballs, ricocheting off each other as they individually struggle with guilt and secrets and grief and dreams.

The story builds to a quiet, sad end and when the mystery is solved it seems inevitable (though it was never obvious). Yes, this not a mystery novel with clues and detectives and adventure. What it is, though, is a tragic story about the damaging repercussions of prejudice and silence. show less

Visitation Street is the second book published under Dennis Lehane’s new imprint at Harper Collins. My feeling: VisitationStreetif it’s good enough for Dennis, it’s good enough for me. That can be a dangerous philosophy but in this particular case, it worked quite well. I don’t think I’m ruining anything by saying that two fifteen year old girls take a rubber raft out on the bay at the end of Red Hook in Brooklyn and only one comes back.

Is there a mystery? Sure. But is that what makes this story so good? Not at all. Ms. Pochoda has explored a way of life; the life in Red Hook through several characters that interact with and have an impact on Valerie, the girl who returns. Through these characters, Ms. Pochoda portrays the show more evident racial divide in Red Hook, the secrets that people hold inside and the reasons for their actions, and the yearnings that they have for a life different than the one they’re living.

As in life, some of the characters are sad examples of what we do to ourselves, some striving for better and some are just so lost.

I started reading this book in fits and starts but that wasn’t doing it justice. When I finally had time to sit and really read, I got sucked in big-time. I didn’t want to put this book down. I suggest that you do the same…find a length of time to read.

Ms. Pochoda can certainly turn a phrase. For instance, describing what a summer’s night in Red Hook is like, “It’s a hot night in a calendar of hot weeks.” Describing a ceiling in the projects, “He opens his eyes to the water map on the ceiling, the brown and yellow bubbles tracing the pathways of his upstairs neighbor’s leaky plumbing.” Or describing Valerie at the entrance to the Tabernacle Church, “They take in her uniform and her lanky frame–her pale skin and unremarkable hair. A drab piece of flotsam lost in a sea of Sunday color.” To me, that’s good writing.

My only criticism, and it’s minor. There’s a small map of Red Hook at the beginning of the book. I figured that bigger is better so I did an internet search for a street map of Red Hook. However, with the map in hand, I still couldn’t quite grasp which way the characters were going and what was where in Red Hook. Was it important? Probably not, but as an anal-retentive, and since the book was equally about the place as well as the characters, I wanted to get the entire experience. Don’t let this bog you down, though.

As an aside: I didn’t realize that I travel through Red Hook when I go visit the kids in Brooklyn. Who woulda thunk? show less

This mystery started out really strong for me, but it lost momentum somewhere in the middle. It all centers around the disappearance of a local girl one fateful night.

The neighborhood of Visitation Street is so perfectly described, the heavy humidity, graffiti-tagged alleyways, the stench of garbage, etc. From the racial divisions to the encroaching crime, the reader feels like part of that dark world. We meet the owner of a local bodega who is just trying to get involved in the community, a widow who still hears the voice of her dead husband, a young girl grieving the loss of her friend, a musician who is a piano player in a drag club at night and a teacher in the local high school by day, a young black boy whose ambition is halted by show more his mother's failing health, and more.

The characters are richly drawn and much more vivid than the plot. The writing is excellent and it's no surprise that Dennis Lehane was a big fan of the book. It reminded me quite a bit of his style and his gritty descriptions of Boston.

**SPOILERS
I really struggle with the whole teacher-student relationship thing. It's so icky and no matter how well the author tries to show that it just happened and it's no one's fault, in my mind there is an adult and there is a child and there is one person who should clearly be making better decisions. I just can't get behind that story.

I also had a hard time with the characters that seemed to have no purpose. They would be briefly mentioned, but it felt like their story didn’t go too far. Others seemed important but weren’t as interesting.
**SPOILERS OVER**

BOTTOM LINE: I loved certain aspects of this novel, like the writing, but the plot fell apart a bit at the end for me. It felt like it was almost there, but never quite came together. I would definitely read another book by this author and I would hope that she would just keep getting better with time. show less

My book club chose this book for our April read. As I read the book, "who the heck chose this book? Does it mean they LIKED it?" kept running through my head. I see many positive reviews, so it must be me, but I disliked this book only maybe second to "The Cement Garden" by Ian McEwan (which was just plain icky, IMHO). Maybe it's because I didn't grow up in a neighborhood like Red Hook and I cannot connect with a rough dockside town. I don't know, but I never connected to any of the characters, and the teacher, Jonathan, was just creepy. By the end, I just wanted for it to be done - I would have given up if it weren't for the book discussion group. I have just found out that our group is skyping with the author. We're supposed to submit show more questions, and the only one that comes to mind is, "what possessed you to write this book?" So I think I'll just keep my mouth shut. show less

First of all I'm going to say this is not really crime fiction although crimes are committed in the novel's background. It is more an exploration of how one girl copes with the disappearance of her friend, of what makes up the community of Red Hook on the waterfront in Brooklyn, of how residents work to create community cohesiveness, and the lengths that someone will go to to pay a debt.

Ivy Pochoda creates a vision of a community that is haunted by the ghosts of the past. Sometimes the voices of the past reach out and keep the people of the present anchored there.

There was a passage that I particularly liked:

He understands what keeps Gloria in Red Hook. It’s not what is here now, but what was here back when—the history being buffed show more and polished away in the longshoreman’s bar.

As he crosses from this abandoned corner of the waterside back over to the Houses he becomes aware of the layers that form the Hook—the projects built over the frame houses, the pavement laid over the cobblestones, the lofts overtaking the factories, the grocery stores overlapping the warehouses.

The new bars cannibalizing the old ones. The skeletons of forgotten buildings—the sugar refinery and the dry dock—surviving among the new concrete bunkers being passed off as luxury living. The living walking on top of the dead—the waterfront dead, the old mob dead, the drug war dead—everyone still there.

A neighborhood of ghosts. It’s not such a bad place, Cree thinks, if you look under the surface, which is where Gloria lives.

Hovering on the horizon is the imminent arrival of the Queen Mary II, promising great things for Red Hook, and in the long run failing to deliver.

This is a book that will provide many engrossing talking points. show less