Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

ELSEWHERE by Gabrielle Zevin is a young adult novel which I read - and loved – about twenty years ago when it was first published. At the time, it received starred reviews from Booklist and Horn Book and was a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Now it is being re-released with a new cover, following the popularity of Zevin’s Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow. In ELSEWHERE, Liz, a fifteen-year-old, is killed in a car accident and travels to an afterlife where she meets her already dead Grandma Betty. It may sound macabre, but instead Zevin infuses the book with hope, personal growth and adventure where Liz’s advisor, for example, suggests, “That dying is just another part of living... In time, you may even come to see your death as a birth.” And Liz does need to mourn the loss of her family and friends, but she meets new people while experiencing the impact of aging backwards as all the afterlife residents do. The new edition contains an interview with the author where she quotes J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” saying it “feels like an optimistic way of looking at things.” Somehow, I found Zevin’s work more comforting a couple of decades ago when death was a more abstract concept, but I am still grateful for Zevin’s positivity and would certainly recommend this title. The New York Times’ 2005 review references titles like Tuck Everlasting and A Wrinkle in Time concluding, “Its message is how thrilling it is to be alive, here or in Elsewhere.”