ELSEWHERE
By Gabrielle Zevin
Bloomsbury, 2005
Category: young adult fiction
Late last week, just before my husband and I took off for a three day getaway to celebrate our eighteen years together(!), my friend Maia brought me this book. Knowing absolutely nothing about it, I stuck ELSEHWERE in my bag and brought it on the trip.
This is a novel that is fun to go into blind. If you’d like to give this a try, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER.
Gabrielle Zevin built her novel around the fictional wonderland Elsewhere. It is where we humans go when we die. In Elsewhere, people age backwards from the day they arrive (i.e. the day they die) to the day they are babies again … at which point they are bundled up and sent back to earth to be reborn. When fifteen year-old Liz, who has been struck and killed by a taxi cab, arrives in Elswhere, she is in serious denial. She is met on the dock by her grandmother, her only dead relative, who died before Liz was born. It is in Elsewhere—under the careful watch of her thirty-six year old grandmother and while aging backwards—that Liz comes of age. Talk about an interesting twist on an age-old theme!
Although I enjoyed the premise of ELSEWHERE, I did find myself craving time and depth in several places. As a reader, I thought the story often moved too quickly, without much time for exploring the emotions of the characters. I mean, some of the situations they find themselves in are incredible; I wanted them to share what they were feeling! For the most part, they didn’t. Be that as it may, this is a book that gets you thinking. For example, in the ELSEWHERE reality, my mother, who died when she was only twenty-four, is already back on earth as a seven year-old. Cool.