outside Santa Cruz. Yet Ursa's powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee their home for Los Angeles and reinvent themselves far from Ursa's insidious influence. But escaping their past won't be so easy. A series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving Ray to raise Opal alone.
Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment by the mother she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her family's painful legacy.
From the forests of Santa Cruz to the 1980s glam of Melrose Avenue to a solitary mansion among the oil derricks off La Cienega Boulevard, and brimming with the double-edged capacity of memory to both heal and harm, Time's Mouth is a poignant and evocative excavation of the bonds that bind families together.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 1, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9798889567523
- File size: 483275 KB
- Duration: 16:46:49
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
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.
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