The Invisible Hour

by Alice Hoffman

In a place where books were banned there could be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future. Sarah was glad the red-haired girl visited the library, even if she was stealing books. Turn someone into a reader and you turn the world around. But she

In books, no one helped a girl who didn’t help herself and every fairy tale ended with the same lessons. Trick your enemy, do what you must, believe in enchantments, save yourself.

The worst that can happen often happens in silence. It is not the explosion, but the aftermath, when you see through smoke and ash, that you know how much you have lost.

where would we go? She said that once upon a time, a girl at the farm

“Your mother was sweet and dear, and she knew how to have fun, but back then, things were different, and it was an especially different time for women and girls. I fear that time is with us once again, and women don’t have the right to make decisions about their own bodies. It was a disgrace to be pregnant and unmarried at such a young age, at least among those here on the hill. Especially in this house. They had a dream for her, and that wasn’t it. But she had a dream, too.”

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false, and he convinced me of that so that I could not trust a single person outside the gates of the farm. He was not your father, but he promised he

“Nobody ever thinks it will happen,” Sarah replied. “Real life is unbelievable. Souls are snatched away from us, flesh and blood turn to dust, people you love betray you, men go to war over nothing. It’s all preposterous. That’s why we have novels. To make sense of things.”

he was convinced that there was magic in the world.

given him the ability to observe and to feel what another might had also made him

and his uncle Richard had adopted one of their orphans, Nathaniel wrote an ode to the couple’s love and faithfulness.

Later his uncle informed him there had been a drowning, a woman in a blue dress, a spirit called the Mermaid by locals. Nathaniel wrote a poem in her honor and continued to dream of women who were water nymphs, mythological creatures with lilies braided through their hair; he often awoke from these dreams aroused and in great physical need. Once, while walking through

his thick black hair and intense gray eyes, which

No one noticed that Elizabeth was becoming more despondent by the day due to the restrictions that she faced as a young woman. She could not go to college, or even work as a librarian, or find love if she was not chosen, or make her own decisions about her fate. She wondered what it would be like to lie with a complete stranger in a rented room and not once worry what the consequences would be, whether an unwanted child or a ruined reputation or a life cast out from family and society.

When he began a magazine, Elizabeth contributed, but the articles were published under his name, as such ventures were not thought to be proper for a woman. In his opinion, his sister was far more clever than he, which made him even more hopeless. “I

There were nearly always women involved on their nights out, but mostly Nathaniel listened to their heartbreaking stories, the children they had been forced to give away, the parents who had nothing to do with their wayward daughters. It was

Only now he had come to believe that his life was on the other side of the glass, it was right there waiting for him and all he had to do was walk out the door.

A woman with long red hair was asleep in the grass. There was no sound except for the calling of the crows in the pine trees, no shadows but those of the clouds sweeping past in the brilliant sky. Nathaniel ran a hand over his brow

The woman was wearing a black dress and red boots and held a book in her arms, and Nathaniel couldn’t help but wonder if he had invented her, as he did his characters, out of nothing more than words and raw emotion. Perhaps she would fall apart, in a stream

He knew that all things begin with kindness and that all hope began with trust. Robert sat there with the worry evident in his large dark eyes, his nephew’s champion as always.