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Summary
Summary
Chosen by Dennis Lehane for his eponymous imprint, Ivy Pochoda's Visitation Street is a riveting literary mystery set against the rough-hewn backdrop of the New York waterfront in Red Hook.
It's summertime in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a blue-collar dockside neighborhood. June and Val, two fifteen-year-olds, take a raft out onto the bay at night to see what they can see.
And then they disappear. Only Val will survive, washed ashore; semi-conscious in the weeds.
This shocking event will echo through the lives of a diverse cast of Red Hook residents. Fadi, the Lebanese bodega owner, hopes that his shop will be the place to share neighborhood news and troll for information about June's disappearance. Cree, just beginning to pull it together after his father's murder, unwittingly makes himself the chief suspect, but an enigmatic and elusive guardian is determined to keep him safe.
Val contends with the shadow of her missing friend and a truth she buries deep inside. Her teacher Jonathan, a Julliard School dropout and barfly, wrestles with dashed dreams and a past riddled with tragic sins.
Reviews (4)
Kirkus Review
A mystery about a missing girl and the ghosts she leaves behind. One summer evening, teenagers Val and June float on a rubber raft out into the bay off Brooklyn's Red Hook section. Only Val returns, her near-dead body washed upon the shore. But Val can't seem to tell anyone what happened to them or why June disappeared without a trace. For weeks afterward, the Lebanese shopkeeper Fadi tries to keep his customers informed about developments and neighborhood rumors in the case. Meanwhile, Jonathan, an ex-Julliard student turned jingle writer and music teacher, may be getting too emotionally close to Val. The novel's focus isn't on the police investigation, but on the missing girl's effect on her neighbors and friends. Who saw Val and June take the boat out? Can June possibly be alive? Can young Cree tell what he knows without being automatically accused of a crime since he's a black man? The book is rich with characters and mood and will make readers feel like they've walked the streets of Red Hook. Everyone in the story deserves a measure of sympathy, from the girls on the raft to the shoplifting teenager to the pathetic uncle who won't tell anyone anything for free. Red Hook itself feels like a character--hard-worn, isolated from the rest of New York, left behind and forgotten. A terrific story in the vein of Dennis Lehane's fiction. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Blue-collar Red Hook, a section of Brooklyn's waterfront in rough transition, becomes one big outdoor theater as temperatures rise in Pochoda's (The Art of Disappearing, 2009) beyond-category urban drama. African American kids from the projects, including pretty Monique, a singer of soaring power, hang out in cliques and gangs, while Monique's smart, ambitious cousin, Cree, keeps to himself in various hideouts, including his late father's grounded fishing boat. An exceptionally talented young street artist lives in a makeshift shelter in a weedy area known as Bones Manor. Smart and observant Fadi strives to upgrade his bodega to attract the neighborhood's new hipsters, among them lost-soul musician and music teacher Jonathan. On one particularly stifling night, Val and June, hot and stir-crazy white teenage girls, dare to take a pink rubber raft out onto the treacherous Hudson River. Val is found unconscious beneath the pier; June is missing. During the ensuing investigation, even the dead have their say. The mysteries of sexuality, guilt, race and class conflicts, artistic pursuits, and psychic abilities are all in play as Pochoda transforms Red Hook into a microcosm of human longing. With prose as cleansing and propelling as a sea breeze and characters running like strong currents, Pochoda pulls us deeply into this transfixing tale of visitations both alarming and liberating.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
People can never tell the exact moment their old neighborhood disappears. One day, everybody knows where you came from and where you're going; the next, you don't recognize a soul. VISITATION STREET (Dennis Lehane/ Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99), a powerfully beautiful novel by Ivy Pochoda, lingers on the moment the working-class neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn, changed forever: the night 15-year-old June Giatto went out into the Upper Bay in a pink raft with her best friend, Val Marino, and never returned. Nothing was the same after that: developers discovered the historic waterfront, initiating a gentrification that was swift and unstoppable. Even the longshoremen's bars had their history "buffed and polished away." But on the night June disappeared, families still lived in the shabby row houses and worked at blue-collar jobs while their children dreamed of sailing away on a pink raft. A violent death can do that, mark the instant when people suddenly notice the ground has shifted. Pochoda picks her moment well and lets people from the neighborhood - diverse characters who are vibrantly, insistently alive - tell the story. Val is the one you want to protect. She's smart and sensible, but so crushed with guilt over June's death that she's easy bait for the sharks that swim in these streets. Cree James, a kid from the projects who gave Val her first kiss, is also vulnerable because he was seen on the pier, which was enough for the police to question him. Jonathan Sprouse, the high school music teacher who pulled Val from the bay, feels so protective he's now stalking her. Meanwhile, the graffiti artist known as RunDown slips unnoticed through the streets of the waterfront, finding beauty as well as danger. Then there are the dead people who come up from the cracks, their voices heard only by a few women with the gift. They're all part of the neighborhood portrait Pochoda pieces together from the detritus, sharing her vision with a favorite character like Cree, who gradually "becomes aware of the layers that form the Hook - the projects built over the frame houses, the pavement laid over the cobblestones, . . . 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." Over the years, James Lee Burke's voice has grown more messianic, his books more biblical. He's in full fire-and-brimstone mode in LIGHT OF THE WORLD (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), the 20th novel in a series featuring Dave Robicheaux, a Louisiana sheriff's detective and onetime alcoholic brawler whose struggles with his own demons set the fiery tone (and high body count) of these modern morality tales. Robicheaux and posse (wife, daughter and best buddy) are on a friend's ranch in western Montana, where, for reasons that would make sense only to another sociopath, a savage killer named Asa Surrette has tracked them down and delivered an especially gruesome murder as his calling card. Robicheaux, who maintains a superstitious belief in tangible evil that can be overcome by earthly men of honor, swears Surrette is the devil incarnate, citing his abominable sulfuric odor as proof. "He's not a mythological figure," a more pragmatic gunslinger points out. "He's a serial killer from Kansas." Demon or not, Surrette is a monstrous villain, and he makes life a living hell for an expanded cast of the quaintly insane characters who are Burke's specialty. For that alone, let's give this devil his due. Bill James's urbanely amusing Harpur and Iles novels, about high-placed British coppers who work together while hating each other's guts, have come to feel like lethal entries in the Child's Garden of Evil Jokes. PLAY DEAD (Crème de la Crime, $28.95), the 30th book in this cunning series, finds Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur subtly undermining the fastidious efforts of his superior, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, to revisit an unfinished case of police corruption. The longer the case drags on, the more foul-tempered Iles becomes, until he inevitably brings up Harpur's ill-advised affair with his wife. Speaking in a voice that is "wonderfully mild, conversational and dangerous," Iles repeatedly flays Harpur in public for consorting with her "in fourth-rate rooming joints, under evergreen hedgerows, in marly fields, on river banks, in cars" and so forth. Harpur's infuriating response is to open up some opaque line of dialogue that has them talking at cross-purposes until they come to blows. It's amazing how much venom goes into the friendly banter of sworn enemies. As chief of police of St. Denis, a picturesque village in the valley of the Dordogne, Bruno Courrèges is unprepared for the sensational case that occupies him in THE DEVIL'S CAVE (Knopf, $24.95). In Martin Walker's latest novel set in "the gastronomic and sporting heartland of France," the naked body of a woman with a pentagram on her torso comes floating down the Vézère River in a small boat. That bizarre event, along with the ritual trappings of a Black Mass found in one of the region's prehistoric limestone caves, is enough to put St. Denis on the map as a hotbed of devil worship. As one local entrepreneur observes, "This Satan stuff is good for business." But while the swell of tourists ruffles the tranquillity of the town, it also gives Walker more opportunity to play tour guide, leading us through the checkered history of this astonishing region. In the Red Hook neighborhood where Ivy Pochoda sets her novel, the living walk 'on top of the dead.'
Library Journal Review
Pochoda's second novel (after The Art of Disappearing) is the second book from Dennis Lehane's eponymous imprint at Ecco (after Attica Locke's The Cutting Season), and it's easy to see why he's throwing his significant weight behind her work. Set in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, the novel opens on a warm summer evening when 15-year-old Val and June push a small pink raft onto the bay and set sail. Only Val makes it back to shore, and as the resulting drama unspools as readers meet a full cast of utterly believable characters including Fadi, a shopkeeper-turned-newsman; Cree, a local boy who winds up targeted by the police; and Jonathan, a music teacher who gets entangled in the mystery of June's disappearance. It's an opera set in one small community, and as Val struggles to cope with the loss of her friend and the neighborhood characters play their parts, large and small, Pochoda's riveting prose will keep readers enthralled until the final page. VERDICT The prose is so lyrical and detailed that readers will easily imagine themselves in Red Hook. A great read for those who enjoy urban mysteries and thrillers with a literary flair. [See Prepub Alert, 1/14/13; see also an interview with Lehane about his new imprint in Kristi Chadwick's Mystery Genre Spotlight feature, LJ 4/15/13.-Ed.]-Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.