I think this is the perfect read for a very specific reader. I didn’t read any blurbs before diving into this one, and I’m glad. I don’t love cult books, and I probably wouldn’t have picked it up, but this is much more than that. It’s about sisterhood, California in the 1950s and has some magical realism/woo thrown in. This would be a great vacation read for a literary reader!

There's nothing this book leaves out. Generations of trauma and what it takes to overcome what our family passes on to us. The trippy science-fiction twist of going back in time only to view the past is so brilliant. I lovr how it comes into play in the end.

Opal is perfect. And I love Cherry. And I feel like what Edan Lepucki does so well is never losing sight of the characters for plot. The act true, and there's such realness in their decisions, and everything is earned. The writing us flawless and the ending is perfect.

As editor, I requested Time's Mouth as background reading for a review on BookBrowse. I thought the book excellent, as did our reviewer; and I have talked it up in a number of in-person and online chats with book clubs etc. since then

Edan Lepucki's California has remained one of my all-time favorite books and I consider her an insta-buy author! Time's Mouth is a deeply compelling and unique novel. I could not stop reading it. This book touches on intergenerational trauma, time travel, the complexities of motherhood, and what it means to even be a person in this complicated world. Lepucki just perfectly captures the feelings that I haven't been able to put into words yet.

Like the author’s Woman No. 17, this novel
Will stick with me for a while. Time travel, all-female cult, mother-daughter relationships and intergenerational trauma. S

Ursa can travel through time and memory, revisiting her past. After fleeing her home for California, she attracts a group of women drawn to her abilities. Together, they create an almost cult-like commune in an old Victorian mansion in the woods, working and forming a connection to the nature surrounding them. But as things take a darker turn, her son Ray and his pregnant lover Cherry escape for the busy city of LA.
Once baby Opal is born, a series of events forces Cherry to abandon her child, leaving Ray a single father. But it’s not until Opal is a teenager that everything starts to come together, and their past begins to make sense.
Opal has the same gift as her grandmother for traveling into the past. She must confront those secrets and the generational trauma that has led them all to this point. Will this eventually lead her to her mother?

Lepucki’s prose was direct, but the novel was lagging at times. There was so much detail, and the main theme was strong throughout that, as the reader, I forgave the infrequent slower pace.

Overall I enjoyed the generational stories from grandmother to granddaughter and thought they tied together very well. With its witchy vibe throughout and its nostalgic references, this was a cozy read.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Multigenerational trauma haunts time travelers in Edan Lepucki's engrossing novel.

Edan Lepucki's novel Time's Mouth explores how trauma can linger in a family, its effects passed down through successive generations. At the age of sixteen, Sharon discovers she can transport herself into her past, beginning with her reliving the "happiest day of her life" – the day of her father's funeral, three years earlier. She finds she's able to observe and feel what her younger self is feeling, but not to change the scene in any way. As her ability to time travel improves, she decides to run away from home, abandoning the mother who did nothing to protect her from abuse. She moves to California, adopts the name Ursa, and ultimately creates a cult, her power drawing other women with troubled pasts. The novel's focus then shifts to Ray, Ursa's son, and Cherry, another child born on the cult's compound, who in turn abandon Ursa in search of a "normal life" together. Finally, the story moves to their daughter, Opal, who has inherited Ursa's time-traveling gift – or is it a curse? As teenage Opal seeks to understand her talent, she discovers painful truths about her family.

The story unfolds over four decades, and Lepucki brilliantly recreates each era, from California's counterculture movement in the 1960s to the Y2K concerns of 1999. 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. In addition to exploring intergenerational trauma, the author probes issues surrounding parenting and abandonment.

Lepucki's characters are marvelous as well, three-dimensional and exquisitely penned. Each is deeply scarred, and one of the most engaging aspects of the novel is the ways in which they allow that long-held trauma to manifest over time. Their simmering, unacknowledged resentment is palpable. Ursa's metamorphosis from a damaged teen to powerful cult leader, in particular, is a fascinating transformation.

Perhaps the most exceptional part of the book, though, is Lepucki's ability to imbue her story with a subtle ambiance of malevolence. There's an undercurrent of unease, the feeling that something's just not quite right, but the reader can't put their finger on what's off-kilter; it's only at the book's conclusion that they recognize the monster that's been hiding under the bed all along.

Overall, the book's pacing is excellent, and I found it hard to put down. However, there are a few sections involving Ray's attempt at therapy which seemed somewhat incongruous with the rest of the narrative. The author included these chapters to introduce an important plot device called an Orgon Accumulator (see the Beyond the Book), but in addition to slowing down the story, they seem out of step with the concerns debated through the rest of the novel. But that's a minor quibble about what is otherwise a stellar work.

I loved Time's Mouth from the get-go, but as time passes, I find myself appreciating it even more. I'm realizing there were all these little nuances that made the novel a truly extraordinary read. I highly recommend it to any reader who enjoys quality fiction. Book groups will find many great discussion topics here as well.

A very interesting take on the 'cult' novel. Here we see the growth of something that appears, at first, wholesome, in a sense. And really dig into the how rather than simply the outcome.
Well written, well paced, a great set of characters.

Sometimes, when I'm churning through books, hitting a few 2-3 star books over and over again, I get a bit contemplative about why I feel like I have to read so much. Why I always want to read new books before they're released, and why I have the patience for not so great books. Then I read a book like TIME'S MOUTH and, simply put, it reminds me why I love to read. When a book fully engulfs me, has me in its craw and takes me on a journey. A book that makes me burst into tears with a perfect last sentence. That is why I am on an endless quest for the next book, because sometimes I stumble on a book like this one.

I've been a fan for Edan Lepucki for years, starting with her magnificent CALIFORNIA, but I can't help but feel that her career has been a warm-up to this magnificent novel. It has everything I long for in a book - a strange, supernatural element, a decades long family drama, a cult! Monsters, victims, stories unravelling. This incredible story has time travel and it's about motherhood and loss, and you have to read it while listening to Kate Bush and Joy Division. The book comes out in August so you don't have to wait long. Don't read a plot description, just get lost in the writing and enjoy the journey. These don't come around too often.

I received an ARC from the publisher for my free, unbiased review of the book. I will post this review to GoodReads (as akhuseby), Facebook, and my personal website by 06/30/23.

Keywords: time travel, parenthood, trauma, generational trauma, California

It's rare that I give a book an unfettered five-star review. To do so means (to me) that the book was truly exceptional, standing out among the thousands of books I've read in a half century of life. The book has to have lucid prose, realistic dialogue, an original driver, and thematic investments that the author has woven throughout, among other attributes. Moreover, the book has to make me finish with a "Wow," some silence, and then I want to read it again or tell everyone about it. Better still: I will already be thinking about how I can teach the book.

Edan Lepucki's Time's Mouth deserves every one of its five stars. It accomplishes all of the qualifications for that rating and more. It's fair to say that writing an original time travel novel is a hard ask. Lepucki knows this, if her cameo for Octavia Butler is any indication. While Butler's Kindred thinks about historical trauma, generational trauma, and race, Lepucki leans into generational trauma in ways relevant to gender.

"Motherhood and loss, loss and motherhood---they went hand in hand. Your child isn't who they were the day before, they are slipping through your fingers, they can walk, and now they can drive, and, if you're lucky, they survive, they grow up and move on from you. Ursa realized with a sudden, seizing flash that by transporting she'd rejected the central sacrifice of parenthood. She never let him leave her."

Man, this quote got me in the motherhood feels hard. I've often talked with friends about how motherhood involves a constant mourning of your child as they were, even as you (hopefully) celebrate who they become. I cannot recall a book that gets that truth the way Lepucki's does. What's more, she binds that loss up in a sticky web of generational trauma that swallows members of an entire family.

*****SPOILERS AHEAD; STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW TOO MUCH*****

I find myself hard-pressed to say who the protagonist of the novel is, and I suspect that's by design. For at time, we learn about Ursa (neé Sharon), who hints several times at sexual abuse from a monstrous father by the age of ten. Having left home, she finds her way to San Francisco, but not before she has her first experience of time travel, or what she calls "transporting." She has an experience where she slips from her own moment into a past one: more than a memory, then-Sharon can feels, smell, taste, hear, see everything happening to her prior self in the moment, observing her prior self from a corner of a room like, we will later find, a poltergeist. When Sharon first transports, she is starting her period, and Lepucki makes of menstruation a kind of cosmic font through which Ursa (and later her granddaughter Opal) can focalize back in time.

When then-Sharon arrives in San Francisco and becomes Ursa, we find that rather than healing from her childhood trauma, she has learned to make use of others: sexually, emotionally, financially. She literally starts a cult of "Mamas" on a friend's remote property outside of Santa Cruz, where women raise fatherless children (no judgment from me about the fatherless part, but definitely judgment about the children being locked up, neglected, and traumatized in other ways), farm the land (ultimately starting a lucrative marijuana operation), and essentially serve as acolytes to Ursa. On a monthly basis (of course at the full moon), they gather in a hexagonal geodesic dome with an oculus to feed off of the energy Ursa's transportations generate. (Here a cameo nod to Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale when the Mama's invoke the phrase "May the moon open.") Later, this secondary energy is called orgasmic and can still be rubbed off in its tertiary form as hugs. So the Mamas stay, abandoning themselves to Ursa's service, and abandoning their children on site essentially. The children are literally locked in "the purple room" during Ursa's transports in something that might evoke Flowers in the Attic for you other Gen X babies out there.

In the midst of this space, Ursa gives birth to her son Ray, who is raised around the other Mamas likewise catch-off children, one of whom is Cherry. Cherry was born to Ruth and Charlie. Charlie used to be one of Ursa's lovers. Ursa is jealous when they show up. Then Charlie leaves, and we find out near the end of the book that Ursa talks Ruth into abandoning Cherry with her (sort of). Ursa essentially kidnaps Cherry, who she doesn't even want. All of this happens by the first quarter of the book!

Ray and Cherry, now teenagers, begin a love affair and run off together when Cherry announces she's pregnant. They move to LA where they hide from Ursa and the Mamas, trying to be "normal" and happy for a while. When Opal is born, they're both in love with her, until the baby begins to have "episodes" that is. Of course the episodes are Opal also transporting like her grandmother (again, sort of). Later in life, when Opal insists Ray take her to meet her grandmother, Opal learns during a shared transport that Ursa was effectively haunting Cherry and possessing baby Opal, all to punish Ray and Cherry. Super f***ed up generational trauma stuff, for sure.

Before that, though, we get to "watch" Opal grow up. She becomes a cool kid, and then, like Ursa, begins to also "transport" around the time menstruation begins. Opal calls it "tunneling," but it's the same experience. At the same time, Ray has begun therapy with a Reichian psychologist, who has him scream into pillows, talk into his breath, and gag himself into mindfulness and awareness. His psychologist also tells him about Reich's Orgone Stimulator, a wood box lined with organic and inorganic materials in which one sits and hopes to channel energy. Ray's desperate for anything to help him process and heal from his childhood off-the-grid with the Mamas, so he buys one. When he tells Opal, she initially thinks he's nuts, until she tells him that she can time travel.

Soon enough, Opal and Ray have developed their own set of Ursa-like rules about when, where, and how Opal can time travel in the Orgone Simulator. At one point, the narrator says, "A year into being on her own, [Opal] realized how much Ray was like the mamas; wanting to keep her small and quiet, keep her inside the house." Yes, exactly. Even as Ray is trying to do better than what was one for him, he winds up revisiting some forms of trauma onto Opal. When Opal tunnels back to a moment when Ray was on the phone with Ursa, and Opal hears him say "Sharon," she confronts him.

What follows is nothing less than a tour-de-force of tying up the warp and weft of Opal's and Ursa's mutual and separate strands of time travel. In the process, Opal learned "about what Ursa had done" and she decides she "would tell [Cherry] what had happened with Ruth, why this cycle of mothers leaving their daughters was repeated." And so out of the generations of trauma, revisited on children and children's children, comes a daughter and a mother who realize the only thing that matters is their time together in the right now, that they cannot get back the past, and in many ways would not want to.

**************************************
In addition to this careful, cleverly wrought narrative, Lepucki brings considerable strengths in prose. I found the book lovely to read, with its homages to different spaces in California, to nature, and the characters' meditations on their choices and situations. I stopped feeling like I was reading a novel at many points, and perhaps that's ultimately the magic of this book. It literally pulled me out of time.

If you’ve been on the hunt for a great novel about cults, or if time travel is your thing - you need Time’s Mouth in your life. Recommended to me by my fave sales rep, this novel was my life for 3 days. It’s long - which was only bothersome in the middle - but so good.

Running from the memory of an abusive father, Ursa is taken into a grand and mysterious house in the redwoods outside Santa Cruz, where she begins exercising an ability to transport herself back to moments in her past–and where a women’s refuge, commune, and cult grows around her. Years later, her grown son Ray will escape this place with a young woman, Cherry–but his mother’s legacy will follow them and cause Cherry to leave Ray and their young daughter. In Ray’s daughter Opal, Ursa's ability will live on–along with a legacy of trauma and abandonment.

This is a poignant novel about the search for meaning in the past–and how holding onto that can warp our lives in the present. It explores a fantastic ability, placing it inside a socially realistic world filled with vivid details of southern California in the 1980s and 90s. While some of the messages feel a little obvious, the story kept me engaged and reading–and the key dramatic twist near the end felt convincing and right. A worthwhile read for people who appreciate explorations of mother-daughter and familial relationships, countercultural lifestyles, and how our connections to the past shape our present and future.

I was immediately drawn in and fascinated by the characters. I'm only part ways through but I know I won't stop.

Time's Mouth is a story about mothers, memories, and what we inherit and what we choose to keep, set in the hyper new age world of California featuring time travel, life force energy, vortices, and psychoanalysis. The writing had a creepy quality to it that helped to invoke the hazy whimsy of California. The cultish aspects of the story coupled with the time traveling plot made this a beguiling read that was hard to put down. The story was original and explored inter-generational trauma that continues to live on in the characters as they try to find the missing pieces of their lives. Are secrets just forgotten memories? Is it better to forget or to remember? There's a sinister tension that is present throughout the entire story that makes this an unusual and atmospheric read. A very unique story that asks the question "if you could travel back into your past, would you?