“Trick your enemy, do what you must, believe in enchantments, save yourself.”
Alice Hoffman’s The Invisible Hour (Atria Books 2023) is a slim, magical novel that smells like apples and fall. It’s also my first Hoffman work. (I know – that’s surprising considering my love of magical realism and of the movie Practical Magic.) The writing is beautiful; it seems quite the love letter to librarians and the power of books and reading. There truly is something magical in those first parts. The last part, however, involves time travel and gets a little too Outlander for my liking – it’s not necessarily that it’s poorly done, it’s just that I don’t like it.
Mia grows up in a cult where books are forbidden. Her mother had been an avid reader prior to casting her lot with the cult leader, and Ivy believes it must be genetic. She protects Mia as much as she can, but the community also believes that children belong to the community and not to the parents. Mia’s secret stash of books is discovered and burned, and she flees. Her favorite book is The Scarlet Letter, and she’s stolen an old copy from the library that has an inscription to “Mia” in it – she believes it is magic, but the truth of the magic of the book isn’t revealed until much later.
Here’s my confession – I didn’t like The Scarlet Letter, and this entire novel revolves around Mia and her love of the novel and of Hawthorne himself. Scratch that part off, and the heart is a story of mothers and daughters, which, to be fair, is also the heartbeat in The Scarlet Letter.
There’s a lot to love about this novel, the gorgeous cover being just one element; however, that last part just didn’t hit on much for me. Maybe if the novel were longer and more meat was put on those bones, I might feel differently. I don’t know because again, I don’t really like time travel as a plot.
A Girl Named Tommi 