Catherine (alternativelytitledbooks) - so very behind!'s Reviews > The Invisible Hour

**Many thanks to NetGalley, Atria, and Alice Hoffman for a DRC of this book in exchange for an honest review! Now available as of 8.15!!**

A high-concept journey of magical realism in the literary sphere that got MORE than a bit lost in translation...

Ivy has always been a bit of a rebel, a free spirit, and most of all, a lover of books. Her cold and judgmental parents have no room for anything they deem a transgression, however, so when Ivy ends up pregnant as a teenager, they send her away. Ivy ends up as a member of a harsh and oppressive cult, led by the unyielding Joel Davis, who has no problem shaming women and even branding them when they behave outside the norm.

When Ivy's daughter Mia comes of age, she has inherited her mother's love for the written word and her rebellious nature and dreams of freedom. When she picks up Nathanial Hawthorne's book The Scarlet Letter, it seems as though every page is written just for her. In its pages, another young woman is persecuted for her transgressions, including her penchant for books. Mia longs for life outside her Community and wishes for some way --- ANY way --- to be free.

Then suddenly... she gets her wish.

Mia is transported back in time, and comes face to face with none other than the man of her proverbial dreams: Nathanial Hawthorne himself. As she has come to learn with the help of a few librarians over time, books can take you anywhere...but is Mia able to stay in this fantasy? When the line between dream and reality begins to blur entirely, will the truth she finds be enough to make up for the terrible tragedies and pain she has encountered thus far? Could a book TRULY be enough to save her very life?

Hoffman is one of those writers I've been meaning to get to for AGES, and the premise sounded so fascinating that I couldn't resist to pick this up. I read the Scarlet Letter in high school and remember being enough of a fan that I could understand Mia's adulation for Hawthorne in this book, and I put my usual reservations about cult books aside long enough to try to dive into this story without hesitation. And it worked...for a while. The beginning of the narrative, about Ivy's backstory and early years in the cult (prior to Mia's teen years) were dark, dramatic, and engaging. I felt sorry for the situation Ivy endured, and got emotionally invested in pretty short order.

But once Mia took over...things started to descend into muddled and messy territory, and the wheels sort of came off the wagon.

I get that Mia was supposed to be enraptured by Hawthorne...but I don't understand exactly WHY he was so taken with her. The romance part of the book felt so forced, and longer than it needed to be. There were even portions told from Hawthorne's POV, but it felt more like Hoffman was determined to sprinkle in all of her research rather than create her version of Hawthorne as a fully fleshed out person. On top of this, Hoffman wrote this as sort of a 'love letter' to libraries and librarians, which in theory is a beautiful idea...but having this sort of juxtaposed against the love story between Mia and Nathan just sort of muddled the overall message.

There have been many instances where I've struggled with magical realism, but in this one I think so much of the magic felt like it just sort of happened randomly, without provocation, that it lost the 'realism.' Hoffman spends SO much of this book telling rather than showing, and this also bothered me. Gentle and thoughtful lines of prose were broken up by expository passages that just sort of moved the plot along...and often without thorough explanation.

The timeline sort of moves around, the focus moves around...and for several reasons, Ivy's voice (the driving force behind the opening narrative) gets lost entirely. Instead of a now and then that felt so close in time, I think it would have been fascinating to have Mia's perspective take place during modern times, and CLEARLY during modern times. There often felt like there wasn't enough separation or clarity about what year we were in at any given moment and this book sorely needed it.

While I hoped to feel moved, enchanted, and captivated by Hoffman's brand of magic, I think in this case I would have settled for something a bit more, well, "Practical."

😉

3.5 stars