Time's Mouth

March 1, 2023

Gifted with the ability to travel through memory and revisit her past, Ursa holds sway (rather too roughly) over a sisterhood established deep in the woods near Santa Cruz in the 1950s. Her son eventually flees with his pregnant lover, and years later Ursa's granddaughter must travel into the past to understand her family's burdensome legacy. From the New York Times best-selling author of California. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 19, 2023
Lepucki’s enjoyable if convoluted latest (after Woman No. 17) follows the exploits of a time-traveling woman and her family’s intergenerational curse. Sharon is born in 1938, and at 16 flees her family in Connecticut after discovering a fantastical ability to revisit episodes from her past (she describes it as being “here and there at the same time”), which leads her to believe that her father, who died three years earlier, was abusive. She hitchhikes to California and reinvents herself as Ursa. In the 1970s, Ursa is a single mother raising her son, Ray, at a female-centered Santa Cruz commune, along with other “Mamas” who are drawn to Ursa’s mystic time-traveling capabilities. Meanwhile, Ray grows increasingly frustrated at being one of the only males allowed on the property. Eventually, he runs (as his mother once did), and ends up in Southern California with his pregnant girlfriend Cherry. After Ursa’s grandchild is born, the runaway cycle repeats. By the end, Lepucki reveals the details behind the trauma Ursa faced as a teen. Extensive asides on Wilhelm Reich’s orgone theories and his energy accumulator are bizarre and distracting, though Lepucki deploys plenty of evocative similes (for Ray, guilt feels like “a coat of paint covering his body, drying him into a kind of cast”). Thanks to Lepucki’s fine prose, this intrigues more than it frustrates.

July 1, 2023
Lepucki's multigenerational family saga opens in the mid-twentieth century, when teen Sharon flees her home for a fresh start in California. Sharon has a unique gift: the ability to travel back to any moment in her life and relive it in vivid detail, affecting the physical world and the people around her. Reinventing herself as Ursa, she builds a cultlike group of women known as the Mamas around her and her infant son, Ray, in a remote mansion in woods near Santa Cruz. Ursa eventually finds herself raising Cherry, the abandoned baby of the man she loved and lost, a child whose very existence Ursa resents. Ray and Cherry grow up and fall in love. When Ray graduates college and Cherry gets pregnant, the two run away to Los Angeles, but after baby Opal is born, Cherry is deeply disturbed by the spells her baby falls under and comes to fear her bond with her child is tainted. Lepucki explores both the pain and the joy familial bonds and memory can bring in her inventive, engrossing third novel.

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Starred review from June 15, 2023
Communes and counterculture, dysfunctional families, astral travel...welcome to California in the second half of the 20th century. The first time Sharon experiences her ability to revisit scenes from her past, she's 16. "How could she see herself? She could feel her own body, back in the bedroom, but she was also here in the backyard, without a form. She was a floating consciousness. This other self, the one on the grass--Sharon recognized herself. Three years in the past. She was thirteen. And, still, sixteen. Here and there at the same time. This was the night of her father's funeral. The best day of her life." Lepucki's latest novel is, in a word, a trip, narrated by Time itself. It begins with a literal trip, as Sharon runs away from the horrors of her childhood in Connecticut and heads for a different life with a new name: Ursa. Ursa's adventures in California unfurl through the late 1950s and '60s, and by the 1970s, she's a single mother raising her son at a woodland women's commune/marijuana farm, with her mysterious psychic abilities making her a cult leader. Her son, Ray, does not have a happy childhood, however, nor does his close companion, Cherry. The running away continues--first Ray and Cherry run to LA, and then Cherry leaves Ray to raise their baby, Opal, alone--and so does the time travel, as another character turns out to have Ursa's gift. The novel follows the characters into the 1990s, by which time the terrible thing in Ursa's past that made her celebrate her father's death has impacted three generations of parenting, and the resentment and secrecy that have festered over the decades come to a head. Lepucki is known for combining domestic realism with a magical worldview and/or SF-adjacent elements (here, there's an isolation chamber in a box in the garage inspired by Reich's Orgone Accumulator) and for evoking California in all its real, surreal, and unreal glory. She does it again. This emotionally intense, wildly imaginative novel is both down-to-earth and out-to-lunch. One of a kind.

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June 1, 2023

In Lepucki's (Woman No. 17) latest novel, three generations of women, all with the remarkable ability to travel back to previous times in their lives, struggle to escape the legacies of trauma inflicted upon them by their mothers. Ursa is the spiritual leader of a commune of women in the Santa Cruz Mountains who cultivate cannabis and bask in the energy generated by her monthly "transports" from the eastern wing of their remote cabin. Cold and narcissistic, Ursa is obsessed with harnessing her "gift," to the extent that she ignores everything else, even her son Ray. Ursa is oblivious to Ray's growing closeness with Cherry, an orphan whose paternity throws Ursa into a rage. When Cherry becomes pregnant with Opal, she and Ray leave the Mamas but cannot escape the grip of the women's terrible powers. As a teen, Opal travels to her own past to learn why her mother abandoned her and Ray. Despite the supernatural element and Ursa's sociopathic tendencies, the plot lags, and the characters often do not progress beyond two dimensions. VERDICT Those who enjoy reading about California counterculture and cults may be intrigued.--Christine Perkins

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