Published: 9 September 2005 (print)/11 October 2005 (audio) 
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)/Listening Library
Pages: 275/7 hrs and 3 mins
Narrator: Cassandra Morris
Format: Audiobook
Genre: Fiction
★ ★ ★ ★ – 4 Stars
Elsewhere is where fifteen-year-old Liz Hall ends up, after she has died. It is a place so like Earth, yet completely different. Here Liz will age backward from the day of her death until she becomes a baby again and returns to Earth. But Liz wants to turn sixteen, not fourteen again. She wants to get her driver’s license. She wants to graduate from high school and go to college. And now that she’s dead, Liz is being forced to live a life she doesn’t want with a grandmother she has only just met. And it is not going well. How can Liz let go of the only life she has ever known and embrace a new one? Is it possible that a life lived in reverse is no different from a life lived forward?
Despite being well before The Good Place, this is a beautiful story that captures what I adored about that show: an afterlife that is still a life where you can grow and think and love before starting the cycle again.
There is a wonderful structure to the Elsewhere world while also being mystical. There’s rules and guidelines, there are things still bound by reality in terms of what is possible, but there is also a touch of the unknown, the magical, and the unexplained. The Benjamin Button aspect of the universe was really well conceived and I loved how Zevin ties that into relationships, living situations, and jobs.
We get to see Liz’s perspective mainly but around halfway through Zevin branches out and we see aspects of other characters like Betty and other key characters. I liked this balance because Liz’s story is what we want most, but the small additions of the other voices gives unique insights and great additions to the story without overshadowing Liz.
Stuck at 15 is a hard age, and I understand Liz’s fear at never growing up. She has a strong obsession with her breasts which was interesting, as well as never getting to take her driving test. I liked that despite being in an afterlife situation, she still felt bound by the fact she couldn’t accomplish life goals like getting her driver’s license. The exploration of the stages of grief and the yearning to return to the living, to live vicariously through them, to keep the connection alive is explored in subtle but powerful ways. I loved the gentle way Betty interacts with Liz, as well as Thandie and other characters who are often far more accepting of their fate than she is.
One interesting thing is, and isn’t a spoiler, but I doubt the reality of Marilyn Monroe being there given my understanding of the aging and rebirth system. Even with a vague setting of when this book takes place I think it is still unlikely Marilyn is still in Elsewhere and hasn’t been reborn. Just a curious observation. Other than that I do love the concept of Elsewhere. I love how jobs are viewed and how family reconnects, even the respect and ceremony of rebirth and the regulations around contact with the living is cleverly done. Zevin has created a beautiful story that is light-hearted but still explores the weight of grief, death, and what it means to be alive.
You can purchase Elsewhere via the following
Wordery | Blackwell’s | Angus & Robertson
Fishpond | Amazon | Amazon Aust | Audible
When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can’t let Reality get in the way of her quest – not when she has an entire world to save! (Much more common than one would suppose.) If she can’t find a way to restore her mother, Rini will have more than a world to save: she will never have been born in the first place. And in a world without magic, she doesn’t have long before Reality notices her existence and washes her away. Good thing the student body is well-acquainted with quests… 
Twin sisters Jack and Jill were seventeen when they found their way home and were packed off to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.
Sophie Chi is in her first year of college (though her parents wish she’d attend a “real” university rather than a liberal arts school) and has long accepted her aroace (aromantic and asexual) identity. She knows she’ll never fall in love, but she enjoys running an Instagram account that offers relationship advice to students at her school. No one except her roommate can know that she’s behind the incredibly popular “Dear Wendy” account.
Today is the worst day of Jane Stewart’s life. And she’s reliving it over and over (and over and over) again.
