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“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.” Ann Tyler wrote this first line in “Back When We Were Grownups,” a book I haven’t read but which I first heard of while reading “The Invisibles” by Cecilia Galante.
The protagonist of “The Invisibles” is Nora, a woman who begins the book believing that she is the wrong person. She is a collector of first lines, the beginnings of books, which are her passion and escape from the world. She leads an isolated existence: living in the town where she spent her teenaged years, working at the local library but living alone, except for her dog, Alice Walker.
While Nora’s colleagues at the library, Trudy and Marion, dote on her, she has no friends her own age and no family. As she turns 32, she knows she is missing something from her life but seems determined to isolate herself.
And then comes a phone call from an old friend. When Nora was a teenager, she lived in a home for girls in the same town she lives in now. She bonded intensely with three other girls: Ozzie, Grace and Monica. They made their own family, The Invisibles, complete with specific rituals and traditions. They were all abandoned by their own families for one reason or another and grew to rely on each other for everything.
And then one night, something tragic and horrifying happened to them. Not long after, the girls all graduated from the house and left the town, except for Nora. They were all determined to put the past behind them, which meant losing touch with each other. Without the love and support of these women, Nora became the isolated person she is at the start of the book.
But on her 32nd birthday, a call comes from brash, bold Ozzie. Grace, an artist and new mother, has attempted to kill herself and needs her friends to reunite. Initially hesitant, Nora makes her way to Chicago to find her old friends so very different from the women she remembered.
While she doesn’t necessarily understand why the women did not keep in touch with her and left her alone to process the aftermath of that horrible night, she comes to realize that each woman has her own secrets. Each of them needs the group to be reunited and stronger than ever.
When the events in Chicago lead to the opportunity for a road trip back East, the women take the chance to share their secrets in the hopes of gaining strength from each other and the ability to move on from their pasts.
From Pennsylvania to Chicago to New York, these women reconnect with each other and Nora, in particular, learns how to find a new first line for herself. She may have felt that she turned into the wrong person at the start, but by bonding with her friends again, she journeys toward the person she was meant to be all along.
This is a lovely, poignant book about female friendships and making your own family. By the end, Nora had come to terms with her past and was ready to move forward. She certainly was the main focus of the book. Author Cecilia Galante left the other character’ stories open ended, which felt to me that a sequel (or three) could be written in order to return to Ozzie, Grace and Monica and find out what happened to them. My only complaint about the book was that I wanted their stories to be resolved, but also a quick wrap up at the end would not have had the same emotional pickup.
If you’re looking for a compelling, powerful summer read, “The Invisibles” is a page turner that is perfect for a rainy beach day.
