She Never Told Me About the Ocean
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta’s She Never Told Me About the Ocean (2021) scrutinizes the experiences and emotional lives of various mothers and daughters, set on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific ocean, while mixing in a hefty dose island myth. Through a story that incorporates the everyday and the mythical, She Never Told Me About the Ocean highlights the interconnectedness of birth, death, and humanity. This novel, McKetta’s debut fiction, tells the intimate story of three island women and their overlapping lives as they make peace with themselves, their mothers, and their place in the universe.
Told in first person from alternating perspectives, She Never Told Me About the Ocean follows the lives of a number of women—Sage, Marella, and Ilya—as they occupy the three stages of womanhood—maiden, mother, and crone. McKetta divides her novel into three parts that seem to reflect this progression. A fourth female character, Charon, the Underworld’s ferrywoman, also contributes to the first person perspectives, and her inclusion makes the novel all the more rich, unsettling, and thought-provoking. The fantastical mythos of Charon and Death that winds through the novel provides depth to the interconnectedness of Sage, Marella, and Ilya’s lives. Ultimately, these stories seem bound to converge as the mortal women find love, healing, and peace while learning to let go and allow themselves ride life’s waves of birth and rebirth.
The story centers on Sage as she comes of age and says goodbye to her beloved grandmother who shares a startling secret just before succumbing to cancer in the novel’s opening pages. Through Sage’s grief and her mother’s secrets, the theme of death emerges early, as does the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters. Sage’s grandmother’s death leads to a new life for young Sage as she moves to Dragon Island and into her mother’s family’s home. From this tiny island in the middle of the ocean, Sage endeavors to understand her family’s mysteries and find herself. As one expects in any island story, the ocean plays a significant role in the lives of all its characters. Sage’s progression is linked to her growing relationship with the ocean, as well as with the novel’s other characters.
Marella, Sage’s mother, is a complicated character from the start. Crippled by years of grief and loss, Marella has lost herself and seems paralyzed. Her mother’s death and the consequent move home catalyze much-needed change for Marella. Back on the island of her childhood and early motherhood, Marella wrestles with self-forgiveness and faith, as she too must make peace with the ocean and her past.
As McKetta’s novel unfolds the theme of death blurs into the theme of birth. Through Ilya, the island’s midwife who quickly becomes a mentor to Sage, birth seems to replace death as the novel’s fundamental theme. In fact, She Never Told Me About the Ocean plays upon the concept that death is simply another birth. Just as the novel’s characters’ lives are interconnected, their births and death are likewise nested together.
Sage, Marella, and Ilya’s stories ebb and flow like waves as themes and stories swirl together. She Never Told Me About the Ocean is at once hopeful and healing, tragic and raw. Its characters grieve, grow, and transform, and McKetta leaves her reader with plenty of pondering to do. Myth and everyday life certainly collide in this fascinating, thought-provoking new novel. She Never Told Me About the Ocean transports its reader to a Pacific island surrounded by ocean and myth; once there, the reader comes face-to-face with the pain and beauty of birth, life, and rebirth alongside a cast of strong, interconnected female characters.
Bibliography:
McKetta, Elisabeth Sharp. She Never Told Me About the Ocean. Paul Dry Books: Philadelphia, 2021.
