Buy it here:
Synopsis:
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 (longlisted 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 to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle into 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.
Review:
For better or worse, Kit, the narrator of We Were the Universe, has an inner life that is far more dangerous than her exterior life. When we meet her on the park bench, watching her three year old, Gilda, bullying her way through the playground, she is fantasizing about having a romantic relationship with the mother on the bench next to her, and affair that his steamy and satisfying and also outside of her marriage. This escapism is consistent in her life, always clouding the boringness of marriage and motherhood, and always largely relevant because she is doing her best to avoid thinking about her dead sister, her hoarder mother, and the life that she now has that is so far away from her teenage years.
For better or worse, Kit is a compelling, well constructed character. Kimberly King Parsons writes a woman who knows she is having issues with the loss of her sister coming only months before the birth of Gilda, and it was easy for her to switch one love with the other at the beginning, but now the cracks in the facade are causing problems in her life. She is starting to have panic attacks, become unreliable, and the fantasy world that she hides behind is starting to seep too much into her daily routine. This all feels like a natural progression, and what she does not realize is that she is surrounded by the people that notice these changes in her quicker than she has notice it herself. Her husband, Jad, is a fairly minor character in the novel, smaller even that her friend Pete who takes her to Montana for a weekend to get her away from Gilda and her life for a few days. Both Jad and Pete are supportive and only want the best for her, and you can feel the honest concern by them. This this brings wholesomeness to her life at a time when everything is growing more chaotic, impulsive, and falling apart.
For better or worse, We Were the Universe is a debut novel that is just as compelling and wonderful as Black Light, the short story collection that preceded this. Some readers might not like that this is heavily about motherhood or that Kit is doing her own things without regard to her family, her child, or those around her, but Kimberly King Parsons does a great job making this story her own and telling it only how she can tell it. She writes characters that feel like they could be walking down the street next to me, and I would not think anything of it until they stop to dig through a trash can because they see something salvageable. Every story told by her has been fabulous, and this has made me want to go back and reread Black Light.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Other books by Kimberly King Parsons reviewed:
ghostvillehero 