cover image So I Kissed Her Little Sister

So I Kissed Her Little Sister

Elizabeth Ashworth. Parthian, $9.95 (120pp) ISBN 978-1-902638-02-7

Ashworth's slender debut novel uses economical prose to explore the paradoxical relationship between human solitude and the interconnection of all things. Johanna, 49, feels that every relationship, career move and turning point of her life has been informed by the halcyon thousand days when she was an only child, before the rude awakening occasioned by the birth of her sister, Lottie. Now, undergoing hypnotherapy, Johanna dredges up key points of her past in an attempt to free herself from her demons. She recalls marrying too young, embarking on motherhood only to be separated from her son; undertaking careers as a poet, painter, reporter and teacher of English in Greece and Sicily; entering into a later relationship with a substantially younger man. She seeks to learn, Siddhartha-like, how to move forward with her life rather than backward to the falsely Elysian past. Setting the novel primarily in Wales, Ashworth paints the rural countryside as seductively, meditatively isolated. Johanna's self-described ""writer's eyes"" are able to see and analyze in different modes: clinical, psychological, emotional. Readers with their own yearnings to again be a child at the center of the universe will find truth in Johanna's attempts to attain closure, while those with no such longing will applaud her struggle to take full responsibility for her life. (Apr.)