The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman

“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 an 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, that is what it means to be human.”

-The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman

After finishing the Practical Magic series, I found myself wanting more Alice Hoffman. It’s hard to just read one of her books, they are full of incredible beauty and a flurry of emotions that linger with you long after you’ve finished. The Invisible Hour absolutely tore at my heart strings. This is one of the most emotional books I’ve read by her so far, but I know some of her other novels like Faithful and The Red Garden have affected me in the same way. Yet this is a book that is going to sit with me for a long time, I don’t think I will ever forget it.

This story begins with a young woman, Ivy. Ivy falls in love with a young man who she believes will give her the stars, but instead he tosses her aside the minute she becomes pregnant, telling her that it’s her problem to deal with and he wants nothing to do with her. Heartbroken, Ivy instead turns to her parents, trusting them to help her. But it soon becomes clear that her parents only want to make this problem disappear. They want to send Ivy away to have the baby in secret and then give it up for adoption. But Ivy is already in love with her daughter. Young, afraid and having not even finished high school, Ivy runs away and comes across a community in Massachusetts that promises to welcome her into the fold.

But this community is not all it seems. The leader, Joel, falls for Ivy quickly and promises her the world. And Ivy agrees to stay because she feels she has no other option. This is a place where books are forbidden and the children belong to everyone, and after her daughter, Mia is born, she realizes what a mistake she made.

The book begins with Ivy, but it ends with Mia. Most of the novel follows Mia trying to escape the life she was born into. She doesn’t understand the path that led her mother here, but she knows there is something not quite right about this community and it isn’t until she discovers the library in town and all the books inside of it that she realizes the world is so much bigger than she ever thought possible.

“They thought I only had a life that I lived here, but I had found other possibilities every time I read a book.”

I loved this story because books saved Mia. And books always save us, don’t they? For Mia, it was The Scarlet Letter that she first glimpses in the library, a book that looks so much like her mother’s life she can’t help but find solace in it. There were many threads of Nathaniel Hawthorne within The Invisible Hour, and I realized in reading this how little I’ve actually read by that author. I only studied The Scarlett Letter in college, and unfortunately I did not have the best professor for that class so what might have been a book I loved became one I didn’t like that much. I’m not sure I will ever go back and read that one, but I love Alice Hoffman’s homage to that book, and I definitely want to try other books by him and see if those stick with me like they did with Mia. I can measure the ups and downs in my life in the books I’ve read, and I don’t think that will ever change.

I could go on and on about this book, but the last thing I will add that I loved is how the story wove the importance of choice and deciding your own fate into every page. The world as it is now is terrifying as human rights become more and more threatened all the time. In a lot of ways, we are stepping backwards when we should be moving forward. This book is a reminder of how far we have come, how far we still need to go. Ivy and Mia and the other women in this book made decisions to change their life, chasing their dreams and trying to build a life they didn’t want to escape from. Regardless of whether or not each of them succeeded, the point is that they tried.

This book came into my hands at a time I needed it the most, and I’m always going to feel comforted when I open another book by Alice Hoffman.

“Sometimes walking away is the bravest thing you can do. When you get there, you’ll know where you are.”