Her entry begins:I just got back from a week in Costa Rica and spent much of the week before my trip trying to decide what books to bring with me. In a rare move for me, I wasn’t brining my computer and knew there would be no book stores in the remote region where I was going to be. I was worried about being without books I really wanted read -- the vacationers equivalent, I suppose, of what books would you take to a desert island. I spent a long time browsing in my favorite bookstore, changing my mind a few times before I decided to go with two books that I hoped would be sure things.About Visible City, from the publisher:
The first book I read was Where’d You Go Bernadette, Maria Semple’s satirical and extremely entertaining take on motherhood, private schools, high tech careers, Seattle and much more. Constructed out of emails, FBI reports, school report cards and letters, the book tells the story of the unraveling of Bernadette, a one-time famed architect who pulls a disappearing act that involves the South Pole, the Russian Mafia, and over-zealous private school mothers. I...[read on]
An intimate and provocative novel about three couples whose paths intersect in their New York City neighborhood, forcing them all to weigh the comfort of stability against the costs of change.Visit Tova Mirvis's website and Facebook page.
Nina is a harried young mother who spends her evenings spying on the older couple across the street through her son’s Fisher-Price binoculars. She is drawn to their quiet contentment—reading on the couch, massaging each other’s feet—so unlike her own lonely, chaotic world of nursing and soothing and simply getting by. One night, through that same window, she spies a young couple in the throes of passion. Who are these people, and what happened to her symbol of domestic bliss?
In the coming weeks, Nina encounters the older couple, Leon and Claudia, their daughter Emma and her fiancé, and many others on the streets of her Upper West Sideneighborhood, eroding the safe distance of her secret vigils. Soon anonymity gives way to different—and sometimes dangerous—forms of intimacy, and Nina and her neighbors each begin to question their own paths.
With enormous empathy and a keen observational eye, Tova Mirvis introduces a constellation of characters we all know: twenty-somethings unsure about commitments they haven’t yet made; thirty-somethings unsure about the ones they have; and sixty-somethings whose empty nest causes all sorts of doubt. Visible City invites us to examine those all-important forks in the road, and the conflict between desire and loyalty.
Writers Read: Tova Mirvis.
--Marshal Zeringue