From the publisher:
A young mother, in denial after the death of her sister, navigates the dizzying landscapes of desire, guilt, and grief in this darkly comic, highly anticipated debut novel from Kimberly King Parsons, author of the story collection, Black Light (long-listed for the National Book Award).
The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit’s best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They’ll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she’s lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and—most heartbreaking of all—her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.
When she returns home to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle in to her routine—long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother’s phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit’s mind, she’s reminiscing about the band she used to be in—and how they’d go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She’s imagining an impossible threesome with her kid’s pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?
Neon bright in its insight, both devastating and laugh-out-loud funny, We Were the Universe is an ambitious, inventive novel from a revelatory new voice in American fiction—a fearless exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, friendship, marriage, psychedelics, and the many strange, transcendent shapes love can take.
https://amzn.to/48RZhry
Kimberly King Parsons’s Black Light: Stories was longlisted for the National Book Award, so there were high expectations for her debut novel, a story about sex, psychedelics, parenting, and grief told through a long look into the mind of the narrator, Kitty, a young mother living in a Texas suburb. Kitty’s younger sister died a few years earlier, and she is still trying to come to terms with that. Her mother has always had hoarder tendencies, but since she lost her daughter, those tendencies have risen to the extreme. Her daughter is a precocious four-year-old who is still breastfeeding and sleeping in the family bed, and her husband is a good guy who is just worried about his wife. All of this is told from Kitty’s point of view in a meandering, unfiltered way, but because of that, we don’t really get to know any of the other characters. It is a bit of a slog to get through, with occasional insights and humor amid the pathos.
Verdict: Stream of consciousness is a literary device that will not appeal to all readers, so buy for demand only. Steer toward readers who loved Melissa Broder’s Death Valley, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, or The Bird Hotel by Joyce Maynard.
©Library Journal, 2024
5/2024 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch
WE WERE THE UNIVERSE by Kimberly King Parsons. Knopf (May 14, 2024). ISBN: 978-0525521853. 288p.
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