this book was UNSETTLING and very cult vibes throughout. There was so many different themes that’s were so interesting to explore. Would be a great book for anyone that likes spookier vibes.

I found this book to be quite unsettling. It explored how it's possible to both love and hate where you're from, and both long for and be repelled by elsewhere. I was especially intrigued by the contrast of when the stranger came to town when Vera was a child vs. when Vera was the stranger herself.

The writing was intimate at times and detached at others, which created an eerie quality to the reading. The town and their customs also added to the unnerving feeling. This wasn't a thriller, but I was definitely anxious the whole time I was reading this book - I could never quite decide if I wanted the town to remain isolated or be exposed.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this unusual and disconcerting book.

Wow! I recently finished Elsewhereby Alexis Schaitkin and I am full of so many thoughts and emotions.

The story of Vera, and the community she grows up in, reads like a fable, an allegory - it's a beautiful piece of writing. I am pretty overwhelmed right now.

Where Vera lives, mothers are revered. However, at some point in motherhood, some mothers simply disappear. They vanish into thin air. The community accepts this. It is the way. They don't know anything else. They gather the disappeared woman's belongings, burn photos of her and then the community takes the items they want to possess. Life goes on.

The mothers who remain question why those women were chosen. Were they overprotective? Did they mother too much or too little? Why would some disappear and others not?

Then a stranger arrives in the town and we see her impact through Vera's eyes.

I love this! It makes you think about motherhood. Does any one action make you a good mother? What is a good mother? Do you disappear when you become a mother? And what about life in general? What about your own acceptance of the life you've led? Do you see it clearly? Are you accepting and happy? Do you question what you have taken for granted?

This is a book you need to read and experienced and questioned!

Thank you @CeladonBooks for the ebook in exchange for my honest review. #ElsewhereBook #CeladonReads

Thank you to Celadon and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I love books that don't tell me what I want to know and instead make me think about something painful and jarring and emotionally intense. No, for real, I love that, I'm being serious. And this does it.

The comps to The Lottery are correct, and this reminds me of other jarring narratives about girls and women like The Grace Year and Wake the Bones and Wilder Girls, but make it more adult. And I loved them all, and I love that this takes them a step further. Because why are frightening stories about the mysticism of girlhood and womanhood and motherhood confined to YA? They should not be. And this brings them forward into something else. It's frightening and dark and nonsensical and intense and I loved every second.

5 stars.

In this mysterious village, mothers simply go away. There is an entire tradition built around a mother's disappearance, with her belongings scattered and photographs burned. Vera grows up, like most other young women, motherless. She marries and becomes a mother, knowing all too well that she may one day disappear.

After giving background, this novel follows what happens to Vera when she goes away. She doesn't die, but lives another life, in which she is not a mother. Unlike most others, she returns to the village, only to make a heartbreaking discovery.

This novel is unique. Is it an allegory for motherhood, or simply a strange story? It could go either way. #Elsewhere #NetGalley

This unique novel will pull on the heartstrings of all mothers. Elsewhere follows the story of Vera, as she grows up in a town, “Elsewhere”, where as a mother, you can disappear into thin air, leaving behind your husband and children to wail in your absence. The townspeople of elsewhere see this affliction as normal and doesn’t understand that outside of Elsewhere, mother’s don’t disappear into thin air. Now that she is grown up, married, and has a daughter does she stay until she’s nothing but the clouds or does she leave with the hope that her daughter and husband will carry on her memory?

What I loved about this book is the storyline. You can read through it and see the storyline as black and white or you can read the story and see what hidden beneath the words. The love of a mother is never ending. “Once you cross the threshold of motherhood, you can’t go back.” It is built into a mother’s DNA to protect her family but what happens when a mother is not needed as often? Is she still a mother? Is there an underlying link in a mother and child’s DNA that keeps the bond open internally forever? You can just feel the author’s emotions as you follow this story and Vera. How you can easily be scared of something, or someone, that you don’t understand.

What a story. The cult like atmosphere and hidden town that exudes European influence was a great setting. I fell into this story head over and really enjoyed my time.

This isn't my usual genre but I read it thinking it might be a good book club pick. It definitely raises interesting thoughts about the nature of motherhood and the way mothers are judged by others and themselves. This is beautifully written but I guess I need more certainty in my novels, less unanswered questions.

I was interested in reading Elsewhere because I enjoyed Saint X. Although Elsewhere is well-written, unfortunately I just couldn’t get into the story.

Elsewhere follows Vera who lives in a remote community that is completely shut out from the outside world (“elsewhere”) where, for reasons unknown, mothers sometimes disappear.⁣
—⁣
The writing is purposeful and unique, the plot is rich and propulsive. This story, to me, was so captivating. I could not stop reading it. The book presents an interesting treatise on motherhood and how society views mothers. Consider that if only some mothers disappear as they do in the story - everyone will wonder why and dissect every stitch of a vanished mother’s parenting, her womanhood, her being. This sometimes was a bit heavy handed but showed a direct link to the ways in which mothers have to dodge criticism no matter what way they choose to parent. ⁣
—⁣
I so loved this book (and Schaitkin’s first, Saint X) and it REALLY resonated with me as a mother. There were so many wise nuggets I highlighted like:⁣
⁣
I wasn’t me at all in these moments. I had disappeared, not from my child, but into her. I was only a mother. Was this dangerous, was it safe? Was it good, was it bad? I didn’t know. I knew only that I loved it.⁣
⁣
—⁣
Through and through, I appreciated so much about this book. Thank you endlessly to @celadonbooks and @netgalley for the chance to read it.

Thank you to celadon books for my gifted copy of this book for my honest opinion.
This book was just ok for me. The book seemed to drag on, maybe it just wasn’t a book for me but I honestly just didn’t get the story. I felt lost as to what was going on. I liked Vera’s character overall but I felt left with more questions then answers when I finished it.

I was so excited when I received this book. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this as much as I expected. It was way too slow to get going for me. I was left with many unanswered questions. Some things just never made sense even though lots of focus was put on them (example: sucking husbands blood).

Very interesting and compelling. I found this built a bit too much for such a subtle conclusion, but still thoroughly enjoyed this. Sad and dismal view of what it means to be a woman, mother, daughter.

Thank you to #NetGalley.

I am definitely not a sci fi reader and I didn't realize this book was. I only wanted to read it because I read Saint X and did not really like it.

I really did like this book once I got into it. It was a strange book and liked the second half better than the first. It had me wanting to keep reading it to see what happened to the "mothers." I was a little surprised to say in the least of how this book panned out and how it ended.

Vera has grown up in a small, isolated town. There, the girls become wives, the wives become mothers, and then the mothers disappear. Vera’s own mother disappeared when she was young. As she and her friends grow up, they speculate who will be the first to go. When Vera becomes a mother, she wonders if she will be able to mother her child or if she will disappear.

This is far from my usual genre and falls under the category of “speculative fiction”. I think it is just not a genre I’m particularly interested in honestly. But I will say this book made me think about motherhood - how often to do fear we are not enough? How often do women lose themselves in motherhood until they are, quite frankly, just a cloud of who they used to be?

Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan for the ARC! “Elsewhere” is out now.

This review will be posted to my Instagram blog (@books_by_the_bottle) shortly 🙂

I received an ARC of Elsewhere from Celadon Books in exchange for an honest review.

Like Piranesi (the best book of 2020), Elsewhere is a novel that resists reviewing: it’s nigh-perfect, borderline unclassifiable, and much of its magic depends on you not knowing where its rushing river will take you—what rapids will leave you breathless, what whirlpools will turn you around, what estuaries will abandon you in an ocean bigger than you can imagine—or what dangers, what delights, lie beneath the surface. I would encourage you to stop reading here and pick up a copy of Elsewhere, but if you still need context or convincing, well, read on....

Vera lives in a secluded small town in the mountains. Every now and then, a mother in this town will vanish into the mists, and those left behind will comb back through the detritus of their lives, searching for clues that will explain their disappearance. One day, a stranger shows up in town, and the community is eager to welcome her exotic presence. That welcome doesn’t last long. But this is much deeper and more complex than the simple story of an insular municipality turning against a non-conformist. This isn’t “The Lottery.” This is a rich and textured exploration of motherhood, like Ashley Audrain’s The Push but with softer edges, and I loved that.

Elsewhere works well because it is so dreamy and so deceptive. Schaitkin expertly funambulates between menace and mysticism; the story flirts with folk horror, then effortlessly shape-shifts into something more meditative and melancholy, then continues to palimpsest tones and moods all the way to the end. I don’t even know what genre this book is—magical realism? Maybe? Speculative fiction, or literary fiction in which odd-but-perfectly-plausible things happen? (I’d put my money on the latter, but Schaitkin’s text is pleasantly ambiguous when it comes to the supernatural. It seems to me that Elsewhere takes place in a sort of heightened reality, where the worlds bends to reflect the emotional and thematic truth experienced by its characters.)

I am not a mother, so I cannot speak to how this book will resonate with those who are. But I felt like Schaitkin effectively captured the many nuances and intricacies of parenthood, portraying its positives and negatives (and everything in between) without endorsing or condemning it. Here, it is a part of life that provides definition without defining it. Schaitkin affords Vera a great deal of grace as she continues to figure out who she is long after achieving what most people would consider to be standard life milestones, and perhaps that is why Elsewhere feels so refreshing: it quietly unmoors both its protagonist and the reader from social and cultural convention, a “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” but for matters of the heart. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Attempting to pinpoint what exactly Elsewhere is about feels reductive and disingenuous—a failure to recognize the depth and richness of what Schaitkin has accomplished here—but I will venture to say that Elsewhere is about how community dictates emotional perspective, and about how every community has literal or figurative outsiders who cannot bring themselves to belong, and how hard it is not to blame them: it’s about the way people you love can become strangers and the way strangers can become people you love, and the way the world changes around you, like a river flowing over a rock, as you find your way home to yourself, and find that home is elsewhere.

There is here and there is ELSEWHERE. Nowhere else matters.

This is my first Alexis Schaitkin book so at first I had trouble teasing out her level of depth. This one is layered and has a duality to it. One word can mean two things. And this book can be read two ways.

In the first way it is similar to folklore.

There is an affliction that plagues a village. And as we discover more about the affliction and the village and it’s inhabitants it creates an anxiety and a wariness for anything that is different or unknown and comes within its barriers.

The affliction is ever present, and assuredly coming, yet there is still hope.

For some.

This book is in part about missing mothers and what that absence might feel like if you were amongst many missing their mothers.

What are the in total effects of motherless mothers?

In another way, if I dive deeper, this book can be dissected and can mean a lot more. Which makes for a great reading experience.

There are a few themes going on on here. One that resonated with me was the discussion of things existing in two planes-simultaneously. And of people or situations, settings even, being both good and bad in the same breath. Everything being a shade of gray.

I think this would make an excellent buddy read or book club pick. Everyone will get something different and there will be plenty to talk about.

ELSEWHERE…⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thanks to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio and Celadon Books for every single one of my copies!

The writing in this one was so beautiful and Schaitkin's turns of phrase are truly captivating. It's an interesting read - five long chapters with no real sense of place or time - and one that kept me engaged although it somehow left me wanting more. I wish I'd read this with a book club because there's a lot I want to discuss!

Thanks to Celadon books for the copy to review.

“Elsewhere” by Alexis Schaitkin follows Vera, a girl growing up in the remote mountains. As the story progresses, we see Vera go through town rituals and rights of passage. At the heart of this book is women, primarily mothers, and the things that change them, but more importantly the things that consume them.

This book was very mystical in its feel. Schaitkin weaves magic in her storytelling and I truly fell in love with a little mountain town I’ve never been to. It was almost romanticized by Vera. And yet, we also watch Vera fall out of love with her home, which feels very coming of age to me.

In the end, this book got three stars from me. It was interesting and beautifully written, although a little outside of my usual taste in books. If you are looking for something deep and unique, this is an excellent pick.

Thanks to Celadon Books and NetGalley for an advanced ebook in exchange for my honest review!

i loved Saint X but i had a really hard time getting into this one unfortunately. i felt like it was a completely different author - the writing style was different. this one just wasn’t for me