Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950’s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods 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 of 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.
I’m not really a time travel enthusiast, as I said in my review of This is how you lose the time war.
Maybe that’s why I loved this novel so much while many others who love time travel hated everything about it.
Maybe it’s also because I love stories with women and stories with communes and stories with scary cults that are scary because they are so normal and imaginable.
I loved every single character in this novel, including the ones I loved to hate. Not a single person left me indifferent. The story was gripping, and I could not put the book down − tant pis for the sleepless half-night I spent on it.
Time’s Mouth was near perfect. It’s the best novel I’ve read this month, and probably one of the best of the past few years.
💬
Alex