Ursa can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting Ursa’s son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee their home and reinvent themselves far from her insidious influence. But 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.
“Have you ever smoked a joint and read Toni Morrison’s ‘Sula’ in a very hot bath, reveling in a single, rich paragraph for what feels like an hour?” says the novelist, whose new book is “Time’s Mouth.” “If not, may I suggest you try it?”
(April 14, 2023) Washington Post book critic Ron Charles took note of the first place winner of our Eighth Annual High School Writing Contest in his Book Club newsletter, reprinting Elane Kim’s “Aftermath.”