WE WERE THE UNIVERSE by Kimberly King Parsons

Breast-feeding a four-year-old seems weird to me, but what do I know?  So does lying to your therapist, but I don’t think therapy was really Kit’s intent anyway.  I think she goes to therapy to placate her well-grounded saintly husband, Jad, who tolerates her unpredictable behavior.  The heart of the story, though, is Kit’s grief over the untimely death of her sister, Julie, who had problems with drugs and alcohol.  Kit and Julie were very close, parenting each other from childhood due to the lack of supervision from their mother, a nurse of sorts who took care of her patients but not her daughters.  Now that Kit is a mother and wife, she has had to give up two of her favorite pastimes—casual sex and hallucinogens.  The loss of these activities forces her to continually relive her past, which just makes Julie’s absence all the more painful.  Kit, Julie, and their poor excuse for a mother are just not characters that I could warm up to.  Kit may not have succumbed to drugs and alcohol to the extent that her sister did, but she’s definitely off-balance in other ways—panicking at the grocery store checkout or wandering off to a bar and a dog park without her phone and wallet while her toddler is at gymnastics. Jad remarks late in the book that he loves Kit but that she scares him.  No kidding.