The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Life can be long or short, it is impossible to know, but every once in a while an entire life is spent in one night, the night when the windows are open and you can hear the last of the crickets’ call, when there is a chill in the air and the stars are bright, when nothing else matters, when a single kiss lasts longer than a lifetime, when you do not think about the future or the past, or whether or not you are walking through a dream rather than the real world, when everything you have always wanted and everything you are fated to mourn forever are tied together with black thread and then sewn with your own hand, when in the morning, as you wake and see the mountain in the distance, you will understand that whether or not you’ve made a mistake, whether or not you will lose all that you have, this is what it means to be human.”
This is a really unusual book. It starts with Ivy who gets pregnant as a teenager by a college kid who is not interested in having anything to do with her. She then joins a commune that’s more like a cult and has her kid. The story then shifts to the kid who ends up growing up and running away partly as a result of reading The Scarlet Letter.
“Ivy had begun to think that life was made up of a series of accidents and drastic errors. The unexpected became the expected, you made the right turn or the wrong turn, and all of it added up to the path you were on.”
I don’t want to give away spoilers but there is some suspension of realism here around what happens next. This book is about the magic of books and stories and how they can save people. (And sometimes even the writer himself.) It’s also about motherhood and about cults, and about libraries.
“It was a perfect night, a heavenly night, a night that could convince you that miracles were possible, if you still had faith, if you loved one person above all others, if you told yourself you hadn’t made a terrible mistake.”
I love reading Alice Hoffman’s writing. Even though this one was slower for me than some of her previous ones, I still loved reading it.
with gratitude to edelweiss and atria books for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
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