LS 5623 Mod 4



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Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin


Module 4 Fantasy and Science Fiction


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Zevin, Gabrielle. Elsewhere. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. ISBN 9780312367466

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

When 15 year old Lizzie is killed by a hit and run driver she finds herself in Elsewhere. It takes her a while to realize she is dead and quite a bit longer to accept that she cannot ever return to her old life. Her grandmother, Betsy, tries to encourage Liz to enjoy all that Elsewhere has to offer but she is too bitter about everything she won’t get to experience (driving, college, marriage) and becomes obsessed with the Observation Deck and even plots a way to communicate with the living before finally accepting her new life after death. Once Liz decides to stop being a moody teenager, she realizes that Elsewhere looks and feels like Earth. There are gardens, beaches, museums and parks to appreciate. She begins to look for ways to get to know her grandmother (Betsy died before Liz was born) and learn what she can from her new neighbors. Although she will miss out on some very important milestones as she ages in reverse (and will eventually return to Earth as a newborn), Liz decides to embrace life in Elsewhere and accepts a position to help newly deceased pets acclimate to their new life.

Zevin’s tone is upbeat and hopeful not dark or intense as she offers an explanation of what happens when we-and our pets-die. She creates such a believable character that young adults will easily identify with the struggles Liz endures. When Lizzie thinks she is dreaming, she calls out to her mother and waits for her mother to come wake her with a glass of water like a typical adolescent that is not as ready to leave the care of her parents as she’d like to think she is. As she remembers being hit by a car and tracks down the driver she battles with her feelings of anger and sympathy. Then when the realization sets in that she'll never fall in love, never get her driver's license, and never see her family again, readers will surely understand her self-pity and loneliness.

BOOK HOOK/EXPLEMPLARY OR FAVORITE LINES

Welcome to Elsewhere. It is warm, with a breeze, and the beaches are marvelous. It’s quiet and peaceful. You can’t get sick or any older. Curious to see new paintings by Picasso? Swing by one of Elsewhere’s museums. Need to talk to someone about your problems? Stop by Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatric practice.

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? (Description from publisher)


“Speak up”, says Myrna who has a fuzzy white caterpillar of a mustache. “My hearing’s not so good.” “I WAS SHOT IN THE HEAD.” Liz turns to Thandi. “I thought you said you didn’t remember how you got the hole in your head.” Thandi apologizes, “I just remembered.” (Zevin 16)



Awards:

American Library Association Notable Children's Books

American Library Association Popular Paperbacks for Young Readers

Amazon.com Top 10 Editor’s Picks: Teens

Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year

Books for the Teen Age, New York Public Library

Booklist Editors' Choice

Horn Book Magazine Fanfare List

Kirkus Reviews Editor's Choice

School Library Journal Best Books of the Year

Connecticut Nutmeg Children's Book Award

Tennessee Intermediate Volunteer State Book Award Master List

Texas TAYSHAS High School Reading List



EXTERNAL ASSESSMENTS

School Library Journal

What happens when you die? Where do you go? What do you do? Zevin provides answers to these questions in this intriguing novel, centering on the death of Liz Hall, almost 16 years old and looking forward to all that lies ahead: learning to drive, helping her best friend prepare for the prom, going to college, falling in love. Killed in a hit-and-run accident, Liz struggles to understand what has happened to her, grief-stricken at all she has lost, and incapable of seeing the benefits of the Elsewhere in which she finds herself. Refusing to participate in this new life, Liz spends her time looking longingly down at the family and friends back on Earth who go on without her. But the new environment pulls her into its own rhythms. Liz meets the grandmother she never knew, makes friends, takes a job, and falls in love as she and the other inhabitants of Elsewhere age backward one year for each year that they are there. Zevin's third-person narrative calmly, but surely guides readers through the bumpy landscape of strongly delineated characters dealing with the most difficult issue that faces all of us. A quiet book that provides much to think about and discuss.



Booklist

Narration from beyond the grave has been cropping up with some frequency in YA novels this year, including Chris Crutcher's The Sledding Hill and Adele Griffin's Where I Want to Be (both 2005). But this example, Zevin's second novel and her first for the YA audience, is a work of powerful beauty that merits judgment independent of any larger trend.

The setting is an elaborately conceived afterlife called Elsewhere, a distinctly secular island realm of surprising physical solidity (no cottony clouds or pearly gates here), where the dead exist much as they once did--except that no one dies or is born, and aging occurs in reverse, culminating when the departed are returned to Earth as infants to start the life cycle again.

Having sailed into Elsewhere's port aboard a cruise ship populated by mostly elderly passengers, 15-year-old head-trauma victim Liz Hall does not go gently into Elsewhere's endless summer. She is despairing, intractable, sullen, and understandably furious: "You mean I'll never go to college or get married or get big boobs or live on my own or get my driver's license or fall in love?" She rejects her new existence, spending endless hours keeping tabs on surviving family and friends through magical coin-operated telescopes, and refusing to take the suggestions offered by a well-meaning Office of Acclimation. Eventually, though, she begins to listen. She takes a job counseling deceased pets, forges an unexpected romance with a young man struggling with heartbreaks, and finds simple joy in the awareness that "a life is a good story . . . even a crazy, backward life like hers." Periodic visits with an increasingly youthful Liz, concluding with her journey down the "River" to be reborn, bring the novel to a graceful, seamless close.

Although the book may prove too philosophical for some, Zevin offers readers more than a gimmick-driven novel of ideas: the world of Elsewhere is too tangible for that. "A human's life is a beautiful mess," reflects Liz, and the observation is reinforced with strikingly conceived examples: a newly dead thirtysomething falls in love with Liz's grandmother, who is biologically similar in age but experientially generations older; fresh arrivals reunite with spouses long since departed, creating incongruous May-December marriages and awkward love triangles (as Liz experiences when her boyfriend's wife suddenly appears). At one poignant moment, four-year-old Liz loses the ability to read. The passage she attempts to decipher, which comes from Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting, is another meditation on the march of time and change.

Although Zevin's conception of the afterlife will inevitably ruffle many theological feathers, the comfort it offers readers grieving for lost loved ones, as well as the simple, thrilling satisfaction derived from its bold engagement with basic, provocative questions of human existence, will far outweigh any offense its metaphysical perspective might give. Far more than just a vehicle for a cosmology, this inventive novel slices right to the bone of human yearning, offering up an indelible vision of life and death as equally rich sides of the same coin.