Visitation Street

Summer in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a blue collar dockside neighborhood where the East River opens into the bay. The nice streets are the streets that have trees. The bar called the Dockyard is not trying to be ironic. June and Val, two fifteen-year-old students at Our Lady of Visitation, are looking for fun. Val convinces her friend to take a raft out onto the bay to see what they can see. Forget the boys, the bottles, the coded whistles. And then they disappear into the darkness. Only Val will survive that night, washed ashore semi-conscious in the weeds. What exactly happened to June that night has reverberations for everyone in Red Hook: Fadi, the Lebanese bodega owner, is seized by a sense of urgency and he trolls for information to publish in his newsletter; the crime threatens to upend Cree's life, just as he tries to pull it together after his father's murder; and the emergence of Val from under her missing friend's shadow will tempt her music teacher, Jonathan, a ne'er-do-well Julliard drop-out, out from under the barstool and into the starkness of hard truth. A novel about seizing the chance to escape--even at great risk--Podocha has created a masterful cast of solitary souls whose lives are woven into the complicated skeins of love, family, longing and betrayal. Combining a gift for intensely vivid prose with breathtaking psychological insight about her characters, VISITATION STREET is a gripping and absorbing read.