Sometimes a reader resists a narrative the way a patient resists psychoanalysis. This resistance isn’t an impediment to understanding; it’s integral to the process. The very refusal yields insight. Reading Time’s Mouth brought this productive tension to mind as I grappled with, but never quite reconciled myself to, the time travel at the novel’s spooky core ... Her insistent focus on mothering — or not — as a node of feminine existence sneaks its way through her work, threading itself around her other concerns, with the fragility of the natural environment, the malleability of time, the abuse of power in closed communities ... Even as the novel moves beyond the compound into the wider world, this stifling magical force continues to press down on the characters and the reader’s experience of them ... Her prose, at its best, is tactile and immediate...and yet an overload of spiritual 'energy'...bogs down the writing. Lepucki remains attuned to the deep yearning and loss associated with parenthood and childhood, although her characters never quite feel grounded...By the time Ursa’s well-drawn and purposeful granddaughter Opal wrests control of the story, it’s late in the game. What’s come before is not so much a loss as a missed opportunity. And yet, for the reader, all that resistance to the conceit of time travel yields a residue, one sticky with sweat and the scent of mint tea.
...enjoyable if convoluted ... Extensive asides on Wilhelm Reich’s orgone theories and his energy accumulator are bizarre and distracting, though Lepucki deploys plenty of evocative similes...Thanks to Lepucki’s fine prose, this intrigues more than it frustrates.
Lepucki is known for combining domestic realism with a magical worldview and/or SF–adjacent elements (here, there’s an isolation chamber in a box in the garage inspired by Reich’s Orgone Accumulator) and for evoking California in all its real, surreal, and unreal glory. She does it again. This emotionally intense, wildly imaginative novel is both down-to-earth and out-to-lunch. One of a kind.
