WE WERE THE UNIVERSE REVIEWS

  • The New York Times, Alissa Nutting, Her Sister is Dead, but Life, and Libido, Carry On, ”Witty…singular…entertaining… The ride could not be more rewarding; Parsons’s transgressive boldness allows us to feel the soul in places that moderation simply cannot reach. Parsons has gifted us with a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power.”

  • The New York Times editors, 6 New Books We Recommend This Week, “Parsons’s witty and profane debut novel [is] a tender, exuberant and often profoundly moving follow-up to her lauded 2019 story collection, Black Light.”

  • TIME Magazine, The 10 Best Books of 2024 (#2), “In this novel about the shape-shifting nature of love, Parsons captures Kit’s grief in aching and honest terms.”

  • TIME Magazine, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, “Parsons offers a hilarious and haunting look at the astronomical nature of loss.”

  • The Boston Globe, Michael Schaub, In the Sad and Funny We Were the Universe, Kimberly King Parsons Hits All the Right Notes, “We Were the Universe is a stunning novel, filled with compassion and an understanding of what it means to be a person in the world who wants—needs—to withdraw, but for too many reasons to count, can’t. This is a beautiful book that asks how we move on, or fail to, when our universe implodes.”

  • Oprah Daily, O Magazine, Leigh Newman, The Best Summer Books to Read on Vacation, “Kit is one of the most whip-smart, hilarious, atypical mothers in the history of fiction…A book that astonishes by a writer who possesses the same brilliance as her narrator. One caveat: You must read until the end. The last seven pages will leave you breathless.”

  • Elle, The Best Literary Fiction of 2024, “One of a number of exuberantly sex-positive lit-fic books out this year, We Were the Universe delights…Kit is reeling from the death of her sister, and simultaneously combatting an unquenchable libido…Kit can’t seek solace in psychedelics as she once did, but Parsons more than makes up for that with her own prismatic writing in this smart, hysterical, aching novel.”

  • Autostraddle, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, In We Were The Universe, Grief and Motherhood are Horny, “A heartrendingly sad and gut-bustingly hilarious novel that gets at the galactic nature of grief... We Were the Universe eschews the conventional grief novel in its horniness, the conventional motherhood novel in its queerness, and even the conventional sex novel in its emphasis on fantasy over reality."

  • Marie Claire UK, Best Books 2024, “This sharp, funny, howl-of-pain of a novel has much to say about sisterhood, motherhood, friendship and love.”

  • Lit Hub, Kate Preziosi, Vacation Mode: On the Literary Relationship Between Travel and Madness, “We Were the Universe is about living with grief, being gloriously messy, and stumbling into forgiveness and understanding, as much as it is an atypical ghost story. Parsons deftly balances it all, adding exactly enough hair-raising moments to keep us guessing at what Julie might want—and whether Kit can live without her in the end.”

  • Vrye Weekblad (South Africa), Kerneels Breytenbach, How to Write About Sex, “Parsons has a voice and style all her own…It's heavenly to experience the serotonin rush with Kit on a journey into the wilderness — because Parsons turns it into a wasteland of human emotions, all on their way to the funnel of redemption.”

  • The Rumpus, Hannah Jansen, Gilded: Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe, “ Funny, glittering… Light is everywhere in We Were the Universe… In Parsons’s work, it crackles, adds texture, illuminates a kind of sticky darkness. It serves, rather than distracts…. It left me with a feeling of wonder at the ways in which we, as humans, are linked to one another, the way we burn through all kinds of darkness like stars smoldering in the night, how some people really are always touching, no matter where they are.”

  • Chapter 16, Bianca Sass, Love and Grief, “Much of We Were the Universe reads like the transcript of a raunchy standup comedy show — if the comedian was a modern-day Edna Pontellier of The Awakening or Nora Helmer of A Doll’s House. Kit provides particularly hysterical and creative, if ambivalent, commentary on parenting…Kit undergoes a gradual, organic shift — masterfully depicted by Parsons — which will leave readers feeling surprisingly hopeful.”

  • Kirkus Reviews, ☆Starred☆, “Remarkable and original…This book seems suggestive evidence of a New Psychedelia, young women writers updating Carlos Castaneda for the 21st century, filling the eternal trippy desert with love and yearning and laughter. Parsons has created a character so appealing in her cheerful brokenness that you won’t want to leave her side for a minute.”

  • Southwest Review, Madison Ford, The Study of a Band and its Ashes, “We Were the Universe is an honest punk novel: albums are recorded in closets and drugs are done in trailers; there is artistry and there is experimentation and there is self-destruction, but the band only has each other to bear witness.”

  • Psychedelic Press, Natalie Storey, The Psychedelic Experience in We Were the Universe. “Kimberly King Parsons renders the psychedelic experience whimsical, feral and queer…We Were the Universe shows how much more space is available when we return to sensuality and allow boundaries to blur. Profoundly whimsical, the novel reflects the psychedelic experience in the realest way possible.”

  • Electric Lit, Michelle Hart, 42 Queer Books You Need to Read in 2024. "Parsons’s first book, the wonderful short story collection Black Light brimmed with world-weary wit, queer yearning, and Hempel-esque sentences so deftly crafted. Her first novel is just as much a marvel, following a horny housewife and young mother who desperately needs time away for and from herself."

  • Booklist, "Parsons's captivating novel is wholly alert to the untidiness of life, and Kit’s stream of thought is sensationally alive, a heart-wrenching foray into the complexity of loss and identity."

  • Dallas Morning News, Joyce Saenz Harris, Author debuts first novel about ‘Texas, motherhood and psychedelics’, “Gilda, who seems to have inherited the singing voice of the aunt she never knew, has now become the center of her mother’s world. One can imagine Kit whispering the name of her band to her sleeping child: You are the universe. That’s what our loved ones are, after all.”