The Invisible Hour, by Alice Hoffman

This is the second book I’ve read this year that imagines Nathaniel Hawthorne as an irresistible romantic hero, and frankly, I had trouble buying it in both cases. I re-read The Scarlet Letter in preparation for reading Laurie Lico Albanese’s Hester, so it was fresh in my mind when I came to The Invisible Hour, a novel about a young woman who grows up in a restrictive fundamentalist cult/commune and finds in classic novels, especially The Scarlet Letter, her only escape. I wasn’t entirely prepared for this novel to take a time-travelling twist, and even less prepared, as I said, for the entrance of Sexy Nathaniel Hawthorne for the second time in my reading year. While I loved the last Alice Hoffman novel I read — The World That We Knew — this one didn’t grab me in the same way at all.