Visitation Street: A Novel

A gritty urban drama about the many—and sometimes torturous—forms of redemption

It is summer in Red Hook, Brooklyn—an isolated blue-collar neighborhood where hipster gourmet supermarkets push against tired housing projects and the East River opens into the bay. Bored and listless, fifteen-year-old June and Val are looking for fun. Forget the boys, the bottles, the coded whistles. Val wants to do something wild and a little crazy: take a raft out onto the bay. But on the water during the humid night, the girls disappear. Only Val returns, washing ashore in the weeds, bruised and unconscious.

This shocking event echoes through the lives of Red Hook’s diverse residents. Fadi, the Lebanese bodega owner who hopes that his shop is a place to share neighborhood news, trolls for information about June’s disappearance. Cree, just beginning to pull it together after his father’s murder, unwittingly makes himself the chief suspect in the investigation, but an enigmatic and elusive guardian is determined to keep him safe. Val contends with the shadow of her missing friend and a truth she’s buried deep inside. Her teacher Jonathan, a Juilliard dropout and barfly, wrestles with dashed dreams and a past riddled with tragic sins.

In Visitation Street, Ivy Pochoda combines intensely vivid prose with breathtaking psychological insight to explore a cast of solitary souls, pulled together by family, love, betrayal, and hope, who yearn for a chance to break free.