Hey Friends,
I have been trying to read a bit more young adult and children’s fiction this winter because I am teaching a community college class in young person’s literature. It’s fun because I am giving myself permission to read books that I have thought about reading before but maybe did not get around to reading.
My most recent reading project is Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin, a book that I have been meaning to check out for a while. A fellow student recommended it to me in 2005 while I was a student in library school. I tried to mentally remember to look it up then, but then I forgot about it for a while. Eventually, when I was reading her most famous novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow in 2023, I remembered that somewhen recommended Elsewhere to me way back many years ago. It turned out she was quite prolific in the time since I first heard about it, she wrote seven books between now and then.
When fifteen-year-old Liz Hall wakes on a cruise ship, she notices that her cabinmate has a hole in the back of her head, how odd. Stranger still, Liz finds herself that she has a line of stitches behind her ear, and her head seems as though it has been shaved, but Liz does not remember shaving off her hair. This is just the first in a long line of weird things, first being, she doesn’t remember how she ended up on a cruise ship, the SS Nile, without her family and without luggage. Eventually, Liz begins to understand that she is on a cruise to Elsewhere, a land that is just beyond the sea, where you can use view finders to watch people on earth. In Elsewhere, people do many of the things that they do on earth, like walk their dogs and have jobs, but they also age backwards and sometimes speak dog. It’s magical realism at its best.
Check out Elsewhere, the second novel from 2005 by Gabrielle Zevin, especially if you loved her 2022’s videogame-themed adult fiction Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. You might recognize some of the same central ideas and atmosphere.
