Visitation Street

Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda starts off by pulling the reader in with a mysterious disappearance. One night in Red Hook, Brooklyn, two fifteen year old girls suffering from the inevitable boredom of a long hot summer decide to take a small raft out onto the city's bay. Val and June encounter rough waters, and in the morning only Val shows up on the raft underneath the pier, harshly beaten and unable to remember anything that happened out on the raft the night before. June is nowhere to be found.

After the shock of the initial disappearance, it becomes evident that the real main character in this book is the neighborhood of Red Hook. Pochoda describes it so vividly and connects the readers so well with the characters within the neighborhood that it acts as the main story itself. Visitation Street is classified as a mystery novel, but it is not the typical intense whodunit that I am used to reading. However, that did not make the story any less interesting. Once I switched gears and stopped expecting to unearth clues about the missing girl, I was able to get to know the other characters of the town and appreciate the community.

This book is very well written and Pochoda does a great job of showing the characters as they deal with guilt and death. She handles the characters' emotions with an ease that further connects the readers with them and with the town itself. Fadi the bodega owner is a grounded character who shows deep affection for his community and does what he can to help find the missing girl. Each character has their own unique storyline and all come from such different backgrounds but they still come together in the book. This book read more as a dialogue about the neighborhood of Red Hook and its inhabitants than it did a mystery novel, but I still recommend it.