What is Ivy Pochoda reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street.

Her entry begins:

Perhaps the single most important goal that I set for myself in writing my recent novel Visitation Street was evoking the neighborhood of Red Hook where the book is set. Red Hook is as important a character to me as any other in the book. I no longer live in Red Hook or in Brooklyn for that matter. I live in Los Angeles. So recently I’ve been reading about LA. I’ve just reread John Fante’s amazing novel Ask the Dust which is set in my current neighborhood—gritty ole downtown LA (DTLA). I’m really drawn to neighborhoods that are layered, indigence on top of industry, a crumbling, decrepit town replacing a rich, glittery one. Fante captures...[read on]

About Visitation Street, from the publisher:

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-olds 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 survives, 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, hopes that his shop is a place to share neighborhood news, and he 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 by family, love, betrayal, and hope, who yearn for a chance to break free.

Learn more about the book and author at Ivy Pochoda's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Art of Disappearing.

Writers Read: Ivy Pochoda.

--Marshal Zeringue