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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Aug 2023, 416 pages
Paperback:
Aug 6, 2024, 416 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Kim Kovacs
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From New York Times bestselling author Edan Lepucki comes an enthralling saga about family secrets that grow more powerful with time, set against the magical, dangerous landscape of California
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.
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.
Part One Chapter One
Let's begin with Ursa.
She is Ray's mother—though, in 1938, when she is born in the caul like a mystic in Mystic, Connecticut, that lineage is yet to be written. Her name isn't even Ursa yet. It's Sharon.
At first, Sharon is only a beautiful baby, and then an adorable little girl, living with her parents in a creaking clapboard house with a narrow staircase and the faint tickle of mildew in both bathrooms. On a chair by the front door her father's hat settles like a mound of dark soil.
Imagine Mystic, Connecticut, back then: the brick post office, the ships in the port, the sea salt in the air. Imagine young Sharon, the child she used to be, bows at the end of her pigtails, saddle shoes on her feet, porcelain dolls lining her bedroom shelf. Nothing amiss. Or everything.
Imagine her a few years older: slipping into reverie during a dull classroom lesson, or riding her bike through town, or biting her nails. Picture her at sixteen years old, lying on her ...
Time's Mouth explores how trauma can linger in a family, its effects passed down through successive generations. The plot is both complex and involving; it's one of the more inventive storylines I've encountered in quite some time, and I was rapt from start to finish...continued
Full Review
(521 words)
(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
.jpg "Orgone Energy Accumulator")
In Edan Lepucki's novel Time's Mouth, one of the time travelers enhances their power using an obscure invention by a Viennese psychologist, Wilhelm Reich.
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was born in what is now Ukraine to Jewish parents, both of whom died when Reich was a child. After enlisting in the Austrian army during World War I, he entered medical school in Vienna. While there, he became a student and close friend of Sigmund Freud and worked in Freud's clinical practice as an assistant. He joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in 1920 and earned his medical degree in 1922. He opened his own clinical practice at that point, specializing in sexual counseling. In 1930, he moved his work to Berlin.
At the start of his career, Reich...
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