The Invisible Hour
by Alice Hoffman
Historical Fiction, Magical Realism
There are a few elements to my favorite fall reads: the solid base of a captivating story, a dash of magical realism set in the shadowed halls of a library, and sprinkle on some fall magic like apple orchards and trips into the Massachusetts woods.
Of course, all of Alice Hoffman’s novels (Practical Magical, Marriage of Opposites) specialize in these elements but her latest work, The Invisible Hour, seemed to reach beyond the pages to pull me straight into the chilly, yellow-leafed scenery of New England’s autumn.
The Invisible Hour is an unlikely story of time travel, mother-daughter love, and the power of a book to transform a life. We meet the novel’s main character, Mia, before her inception as we are introduced to her capricious mother Ivy, rebelling against the confines of her wealthy Bostonian upbringing. Pregnant and rejected, Ivy stumbles into what seems like utopia, a small farming commune that soon becomes more prison than refuge.
The lines of history in this novel are hazy, making it difficult to tell if Ivy and her daughter Mia are living in colonial New England or in more modern times. This dreamy quality is key to the book’s time travel motif.
“Real life is unbelievable. Souls are snatched away from us, flesh and blood turn to dust, people you love betray you, men go to war over nothing. It’s all preposterous. That’s why we have novels. To make sense of things.”
Following her mother’s death, Mia fills her pockets with stones with a plan to drown herself in a nearby river. But a book, namely Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, saves her. As the novel ducks and dives through Mia’s escape from the cult she was raised in, we watch our heroine travel in time to fall in love with the book’s author. Someone who gave her a second chance at life.
Settle into a dark story as complicated as cults and magic but as juicy as the apples we hear so much about. This novel is the perfect tumble into the spooky atmosphere of Halloween season - haunted woods, red boots and historic libraries galore.