Gabrielle Zevin's first YA novel is brilliant, and readers can only hope there will be a second! Sad, hopeful, creative, and well-written, this is a book that is not to be missed. Elsewhere, Liz thinks, 'could have been a walk to the next town or an hour's ride in the car or an overnight plane trip.' It shouldn't be too hard adjusting to this.right? Everything you can find on Earth-music, books, artwork-you can find Elsewhere. Some artists continue their work here (you can see new paintings by Picasso!), just as they did on earth. Liz will never turn sixteen (but they'll still let her get a driver's license) instead, she'll be turning fourteen again, under the care of her dead grandmother, who is surprisingly young (about the same age as Liz's mother).Įlsewhere, though the people grow younger rather than older, is a lot like earth. In Elsewhere, for one thing, people age backwards. The afterlife, though not as anyone on earth imagined it. Of course, boats have to go somewhere, and this one finally lands in Elsewhere. She was killed in a car crash, and, in the world skillfully created by Gabrielle Zevin, this is where people go once they die. Nor is it exactly her 'life.' Liz is dead. There are no modern electronic devices on the ship, and everyone with the exceptions of herself, Thandi, and Liz's favorite singer, Curtis Jest, is over 80.Īfter watching her own funeral (used by her high school principal as an opportunity to lecture on traffic safety), Liz realizes that this is no dream. In this 'dream,' as she thinks it is, things are a little weird.

Liz doesn't look like she normally does, either she doesn't have any hair. She wakes up on a ship, sharing a room with a girl named Thandi who has what looks like a bullethole in the back of her head. She's riding her bike, only three months from driving a car instead of using her bike as her main mode of transportation, when she is hit by a car. N Gabrielle Zevin's novel Elsewhere, Liz is fifteen, looking forward to turning sixteen and getting her driver's license, when everything changes.

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