Visitation Street, Pochada - B+

                                          This novel was written by a young woman, who grew up in Cobble Hill and lived for a while in Red Hook. And the Hook is the story and the background simultaneously. Two fifteen-year-old bored, white girls decide to have some fun and see what they can see from floating a flimsy raft off the shore. In sight of Manhattan, Governors Island, and the Verrazano Bridge, disaster strikes. The ensuing tale explores the oh so many diverse lives of the neighborhood. There are the Italian Catholics who have stalwartly survived in their row houses. There are the blacks in the Red Hook Houses, the projects where life is pretty much a dead end. Scattered around the debris-ridden remnants of a bygone seafaring era are the homeless, the winos, and the drunks at the Dockyards bar. Across the Gowanus Expressway is the rest of Brooklyn.  Racial tensions, guilt, teenage cattiness, and communing with the dead are to be found here in a really fine  novel.  As sad as life is here, perhaps the most touching emotions are the hopes of the neighborhood when cruise ships start to dock there.  However, "the traffic pattern has been designed so cars can slip in and out of the neighborhood without passing through it, sliding in from the expressway on a small street guarded by police....., avoiding Red Hook."  As the Hook is where my father and grandfather worked on the docks and is less than a mile from where my parents grew up and married, it's now a sight-seeing destination for me.