Visitation Street (2013) is about June and Val, two fifteen-year-old girls
who live on Visitation Street, a ‘nice’ street, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New
York. It is a hot summer and the girls decide to take a pink rubber raft for a
‘float in the bay, cool off, see what’s what from the water’ – but it is almost
midnight.
Only a ten-minute walk from home, they had never been to the waterfront at
night. The water is chilly and slick with oil. They pass Monique and her
friends. Eighteen-year-old Acretius James (Cree) – Monique’s cousin - watches
them from the shore. He watches until they are out of sight. A music
appreciation teacher at the same school the girls attend – a Catholic girls’
school – lives in a studio above the Dockyard bar. During his morning walk
along the waterfront Jonathan Sprouse finds Valeria Marino lying unconscious
underneath the pier.
Jonathan saves Val by taking her to Fadi’s bodega – a small grocery store
that opens early in the morning – where Fadi calls the police and ambulance.
Fadi is an expert on local news and has his own newsletter that he distributes
with coffee and pastries. June is declared missing. Fadi prepares flyers
about the missing June Giatto.
Val doesn’t remember what happened after she fell into the river, she tells
police as she recovers in hospital. Police question Jonathan first, then Cree. Cree’s
father, Marcus, was shot six years ago, and his mother Gloria – like all the
women in his family – communicates with the dead as a clairvoyant. Gloria
supplements her nursing salary by telling people’s fortunes.
Val hears June’s voice in her head. She isn’t the only one. Monique,
Gloria’s fifteen-year-old niece, asks aloud, ‘Girl, where are you
hiding?’ She didn’t expect an answer, but she got one – for ages she
heard June’s voice in her mind. Like her family, did she also hear the voices
of the dead? Fadi’s first scoop was ‘according to Monique, June seemed
agitated.’
Rumors begin about what may have happened on the waterfront. And people
think they have seen June. The local drunk tells Fadi that he’s seen June, but
can he be believed? Renton Davis, a local kid, tells Fadi that June isn’t
missing – she’s dead. But Erin Medina in the class above Val’s says she’s
seen June: ‘she’s dyed her hair black.’ Fadi ‘jots down the careless comments
of his customers who don’t imagine that he’s listening. From this information,
he crafts a biweekly column which presents his findings and observations in an
impartial manner.’
After the end-of-year holidays, Val begins 10th grade and transfers to Mr.
Sprouse’s music class – the man who saved her. He confides to her his secret –
that his mother drowned when she flipped their speedboat when she was drunk.
Val has a secret too. So does Cree, and so does Renton. Eventually Fadi, the
newshound, puts the comments and secrets together to learn the truth of June’s disappearance.
The novel is quite well-written, keeping the threads together until the
truth is revealed. The characters of Val, Cree, and Jonathan – and to some
extent Monique and Val’s father – are reasonably well developed, however Val as
the central character could have been psychologically more interesting – the
fact that she said she didn’t remember didn’t make me feel any sympathy for her
– nor empathize with her. The best character is Fadi who tries to pull the
threads together.
It is not a mystery or crime thriller (even though it is advertized as
such), but rather a dissection of a neighbourhood and its personalities – or
one street in the neighbourhood. In that regard, it is well done, but
over-focused on directions. The beginning is mesmerizing and gradually gets to
the ‘big reveal’ which is really not that ‘big’ a deal. It loses some of its
impact in trying to hide what people don’t need to hide in order not to be
caught by police who never suspected them in the first place.
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