#BlogTour She Never Told Me About the Ocean by Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

It's a pleasure to take part in the BlogTour She Never Told Me About the Ocean by Elisabeth Sharp McKetta.

About the Author

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta grew up in Austin, Texas. She holds literature degrees from Harvard, Georgetown, and the University of Texas at Austin and teaches writing for the Harvard Extension School and the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. 

She is the author of eight books: We Live in Boise, Energy: The Life of John J. McKetta Jr., Fear of the Deep, Fear of the Beast, Poetry for Strangers Vols. I and II, The Creative Year: 52 Workshops for Writers, and The Fairy Tales Mammals Tell. She Never Told Me About the Ocean is her first novel. Follow @ESMcKetta on Twitter, Visit elisabethsharpmcketta.com

About the book

Told by four women whose stories nest together, She Never Told Me About the Ocean is an epic about a rite of passage that all humans undergo and none remember: birth.

Eighteen-year-old Sage has been mothering her mother for as long as she can remember, and as she arrives on the shores of adulthood, she learns a secret: before she was born, she had an older brother who drowned. In her search to discover who he was and why nobody told her,

Sage moves to tiny Dragon Island where her mother grew up. There, she embarks on a quest to learn the superstitions of the island, especially its myths involving her mother. Gathering stories from Ilya, a legendary midwife who hires Sage as her apprentice; Marella, Sage’s grieving mother who was named for the ocean yet has always been afraid of it; and Charon, the Underworld ferrywoman who delivers souls to the land of the dead, Sage learns to stop rescuing her mother and simply let go. But when her skill as Ilya’s apprentice enables her to rescue her mother one final time, in a way that means life or death, Sage must shed her inherited fears and become her own woman.

Review

Since Sage can remember she has always been the adult in the mother daughter relationship. Her mother is fragile and unstable. She refuses to engage with the world or get close to her child. Sage has never really questioned the why of her behaviour until her grandmother says something peculiar before she dies.

The return to Dragon Island forces Marella to confront the past, which includes the island's midwife and her ability to speak truth to the future. It's a story filled with the power of sisterhood, the complex relationship between reality and figures of folklore. It's also a story of breaking free from the shackles of dysfunctional relationships and being able to finally embrace a restricted maternal love, but love nevertheless.

It's one of those books where you go - where did that come from, which well of inspiration spoke and filled your head with such rivers of inspiration? It's a spectacular venture into myth, folklore and magical realism. Simultaneously it's also an intricately woven web of women's relationships. Mother to daughter, daughter to mother, death to living and the somewhere that exists in between.

McKetta is an excellent writer and storyteller. She captures the fragility of life and death, the extreme weight and consequences of unresolved grief, and the fractured nature of relationships strained by mistakes of the past.

Buy She Never Told Me About the Ocean at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher ‏: ‎Paul Dry Books pub date 2 Mar. 2021. Buy at Amazon com