Upon starting this book, I was in love with it. The writing really touched me.
As I read on, I found the pacing slowed down and I struggled to get back into it. I will definitely try the author again, as she has a wonderful talent and there is huge potential for her.

2.5/5

*Big Sigh*…. This book was described as a laugh-out- loud funny, weird, and a heartbreaking window into being bereft and being in love.

I didn’t laugh out loud. I didn’t connect with the main character or feel any emotions for her.

I will say that I thought this book explained very well and gave a great insight to what it must feel like to lose the love of your life, and depicts grief superbly.

Maybe I just chose the wrong book. I guess I was hoping for ‘PS I Love You’ vibes and I definitely didn’t get that.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t like Elsie Jane, and I didn’t like Sam. The books started going down this weird space-time direction and I thought oh no, please don’t get so off the realm of reality that I’m gonna hate this.

I wanted to love the old emails between Elise and Sam but I didn’t, and I thought ‘urgh, how did she fall in love with this’

I didn’t hate it but I was relieved it was over. 🤷‍♀️ I wanted to feel sad and happy and have my heart-warmed, I didn’t, I was kind of reading it with the look of someone that was chewing a wasp (or maybe that’s just my normal face?! 👀)

Thank you to @netgalley for my digital copy of this book in return for an honest review.

What Remains of Elsie Jane is unlike anything I've ever read. Despite Elsie going through a huge life change that few can relate to, including myself, this brutally honest and raw depiction of grief is how I would imagine it to be. Even with a few uncomfortable and extreme decisions, I respected Elsie's journey. Having young kids, my heart really ached for that aspect of the story.
Overall, I feel like this is a book to take care with if you've experienced loss, especially of someone close to you, but it felt like such a truthful portrayal - exposing all the highs and lows - that I think it could be helpful to some.
Thank you Dundurn Press, Rare Machines for the digital ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wow, what would you do if you lose your person/husband suddenly and life wasn’t on track before he does. Elsie Jane’s husband dies and she seemingly is doing fine in the months after. But reality start to get fuzzy and she doesn’t know which end is up. She doesn’t know how the months have passed and she still is in the same spot. Her home is a mess, her children are barely taken care of and she is barely doing anything at work but crying. Her colleagues insist she take a leave and get her head on straight. While on leave we learn all about her tumultuous relationship with Sam, her husband. He was brilliant, smart and funny. But he was flawed.. dramatically flawed. So much so that on more than one occasion, Elsie tries to leave him. But while in this haze of morning, Elsie needs to find a way out. She has to be honest about the past to move forward. Elsie Jane is trying her best to balance family, her emotions and the stigma of how Sam died. This story was so well written. At times I wanted to Elsie to wake up quicker/faster but this was her story. It was interesting for sure. I want to thank Netgalley & Chelsea Wakelyn for my copy for an honest review. It was my pleasure to read and review this book. This was a four star read for me. I hope you enjoy it too..

This novel gives an insight of what is going on in a new widow's mind, written in a funny way thus lightening up the seriousness of the issue. There are moments when you disagree with the main character. Nevertheless, its heart-breaking and amusing, how the character goes through the various emotions/ stages of grief.

For a moment I thought that the book is going to have a sad ending, but the author ends it with hope.

Wow! The writing in this book is amazing! You can't help but completely feel for Elsie Jane as she falls completely apart after the loss of her partner, Sam. Throughout the book, Elsie Jane uses humor and sarcasm to cover up her pain and depression. I couldn't stop myself from relating to Elsie Jane and see myself behaving in the same manner if I were in the same position, including hearing criticism from my deceased mother. There have been several books published recently that have focused on how people mourn the loss of a loved one. It is a difficult space to truly master and I believe this book is one of them!

Solid three star read - After reading 'What Remains of Elsie Jane" I gave the book three stars. There are a lot of things about this book that worked well for me but there were also things I really struggled with while reading. Generally speaking, it isn't one I would push for other readers to pick up. However, because this book is own voices - the author experienced the loss of her spouse to a similar circumstance - I would suggest this book if the story were especially close to a reader's own life experience and they might find the main character's journey especially relatable and useful.

Own voices experience - While the author makes it clear in the introduction that this is not an autobiography, some of the elements of her life and the main character overlap. Most notably, both the author and main character lost their spouse to drug poisoning, and both had children to parent after that loss. It felt like when the author leaned into those lived experiences the book really was impactful. I was struck by how accurate the author's portrayals of dealing with co-parenting alongside someone with an addiction felt. Balancing protecting her children, feeling hurt, and yet also still loving her partner through their addiction.

Hilarious dating scene insights - Every now and then I get a peek into what dating right now is like, and I just can't even believe the struggles. I absolutely loved how accurately and humorously the author portrayed re-entering the dating scene. I can only imagine how incredibly disheartening and soul-crushing that would be after thinking you were done and had found your soulmate; someone who you share children with and have shared all of your stories and truly, deeply knows you to what is a literal, and sometimes deeply unpleasant, stranger, especially with how much dating has changed in the last decade! I imagine I would just not even try so I was particularly drawn to just how determined the main character felt about filling that hole in her life, and how miserably and hilariously it went at each try.

Edgy, quirky language - There were two big elements that didn't mesh well and took me out of the story while reading 'What Remains of Elsie Jane". Elsie is quirky and edgy and in order to read from her point of view for hundreds of pages, she really needed a straight man or woman to balance out that eccentricity whether brought on by grief or just her normal personality. Reading the novel though, you don't get the feeling that that was Sam, her parents, or her sister, but maybe just her sanity is so far gone through her grief that she is the most eccentric version of herself. But without that other person balancing her, it was hard to read for hundreds of pages which I think is also why I enjoyed the dating parts so much. It brought her back to reality in a humorous and much needed way!

Parenting through grief should've been more of a focus - The author of "What Remains of Elsie Jane" infrequently told and rarely showed just how difficult parenting two children would be after losing your co-parent. I think that Elsie's interactions with her children about their grief and her own would realistically have been some of the most emotionally difficult for the character and I wish more of that had been included. Without spoilers, these relationships are particularly important considering how the book ends. I think more moments with her children throughout the novel would have connected more of the dots and really deepened the emotional impact of the book.

An exploration of grief that has touches of humor. Elsie Jane's husband Sam died of drugs and she's been left behind to raise their two children and to navigate a new future. Some of this is quite familiar (there have been a spate of grief novels this last year) but Wakelyn has created an interesting character in Elsie Jane. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC,

Finding out her husband died in the night leads Elsie on a journey of self destruction and exploration while riding the waves of grief.

Seeking to continue functioning for her children, albeit using muscle memory a lot of the time, Elsie looks back at her relationship with her husband while also looking for a way to bring him back.

Filled with sorrow, self loathing and a great sense of loss, the tale also offers glimmers of hope as Elsie slowly finds her way out of grief with the help of insight and a wonderful wizard.

What Remains Of Elsie Jane is the first novel by Canadian musician and author, Chelsea Wakelyn. When her partner of five years, Sam Sorensen dies unexpectedly, Elsie Jane is left behind with her daughter and their toddler son, to negotiate life without him.

Elsie Jane takes the reader along on her very personal journey through grief and loss. It’s a journey that starts at the funeral home and continues through the difficult year that follows. As well as a narrative that sometimes reads a little like a stream of consciousness, there are past emails and texts between Sam and Elsie Jane, and comments or asides from her own mirror reflection and her dead mother.

It's a candid, warts-and-all account, and Elsie Jane doesn’t omit detail that may paint her in a less-than-favourable light. Her affair with an acquaintance, and messages from the dating apps she uses to try to find a “replacement soulmate” demonstrate her state of mind.

“I wonder when it will end, the intensity of the bitterness. It’s exhausting being mad all the time. I’m exhausted. Will I wake up one day and find it has evaporated in my sleep, that I am suddenly capable of empathy and joy, that I forgive everything and am overwhelmed by compassion and gratitude and goodwill toward my fellow creatures? If so, what can I do to get to that place quicker?” Typical signs of grief: insomnia and fatigue (that ultimately require stress leave), loneliness, boredom, heartbreak and unrequited lust are all described.

And then things get bizarre when Elsie Jane fixates on the death of an unidentified woman found in the woods behind the cinema on the day Sam died. Her delusion about being able to alter the past culminates in many Craigslist posts to find a wizard who can help her cross the space/time continuum, to escape: “this hellscape of grief.”

Elsie Jane’s children barely get a mention, and it somewhat beggars belief that she was able to function as a mother and do her job during the depths of such grief. Perhaps that all sounds rather bleak, but there are also quite a lot of blackly funny moments, the first of which must be the search in Walmart for a receptacle for Sam’s ashes. And the story ends in a positive place. A very different read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Dundurn Press/Rare Machines.

Thank you so much to NetGalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What Remains of Elsie Jane is a poignant, funny and heartfelt read that you can easily get through in a single day (like I did)! It deals with heavy subject matter like addiction, loss and grief but does so in such a lighthearted way that you are not weighed down by the significance of what the main character, Elsie, is going through. This book is an exploration of what would happen if you were to grieve wholly and fully, without trying to hold yourself together and perform according to the societal expectations of what a grieving woman, a mother, should look like. Over the course of the novel, we see Elsie Jane gradually fall to pieces and, arguably, lose her mind...and then (almost accidentally) stitch herself back together again. Ultimately, this book leaves you with a feeling of hope, that despite what the world might throw at us there are always ways to keep going, and happiness will always find a way to seep back into your life.

Elsie Jane is dealing with the unexpected death of her husband and falling apart in her grief. I don't know how to explain this book. It is sad and difficult but also so weird and funny. Elsie Jane's slow-motion breakdown is filled with terrible dating situations, unanswered questions about Sam's death, an obsession with a local woman's death, and eventually trying to hire a wizard to help her time travel to prevent Sam dying. This seems to be something of an autobiographical novel and I really enjoyed it, while at the same time being somewhat terrified of being in Elsie Jane's position and wondering how insane such grief might make me. 4 stars.

The setting: "...portrait of a woman unravelling" in the wake of her partner's death [and the father of one of her children]. "... Elsie pores over Sam’s old love letters [emails], paces her house, and bickers with the ghosts of Sam and her dead parents night after night. As the year unfolds, she develops an obsession with a local murder mystery, attends a series of disastrous internet dates in search of a “replacement soulmate,” and solicits a space-time wizard via Craigslist, convinced he will help her forge a path through the cosmos back to Sam."

Add in the recollections of and interactions with her grandmother, Ada May--a somewhat different tone--and which I liked.

Now a single parent, Elsie is unravelling. Her grief is palpable and her sense of loss is real. She also has lost her sense of reality. Grief overwhelms Elsie and the book, though there is a bit of humor. To wit: "My son is oblivious, happily crunching his chemical apple slices."

This book is original. Perhaps the subject/topic is what wouldn't let me abandon myself in the read.

Certainly a cathartic piece for the author--who based the novel on her experience of losing her partner to a drug overdose and parenting through the grief and stigma. Be sure to read the beginning notes.

No spoiler from me, but I quite enjoyed the last part of the novel and her interaction with Paul/Ion.

This one was a look at a woman who is unraveling after losing her partner to drug poisoning. The way this author handled the topic of grief was very unique but so real. Grief is different for everyone, and for Elsie Jane…she seems like she's losing her mind. Yes, this was weird…BUT I really enjoyed this. I'm always intrigued by books about grief, and I loved reading Elsie Jane's inner thoughts and how she was managing her feelings. I do like how at the end, there is some hope for her. Losing a loved one, which is so heartbreaking and soul crushing, there is always a way to heal…or at least a way to accept it and find a sense of normalcy and happiness again, I really enjoyed this one and would definitely be pick up future books by this author.

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for the gifted copy. All opinions are my own. Out Feb. 28.

A darkly funny, charming, and raw look at how grief can consume your very being, and the fight it takes to claw yourself out of the space you’re in. As soon as I was finished this, I just wanted to give Elsie Jane one big long hug and tell her she’ll be ok. If you’re looking for a book with characters you’ll really fall in love with, this is the book.

This was definitely a weird one and I was immediately drawn to the voice of the main character and how she saw her world. There was a lot of imagery that was just so unique and different to what I am used to reading. I was especially enthralled with the very last part of this book where Elsie Jane meets someone new. There were just so many different moments throughout this book that made me feel something, whether it be a little shock or just a complete amusement. I want to read more from this quirky author in the future. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley.

Having experienced the shattering world of enormous loss I’m always attracted to stories about grief. Much of Elsie’s journey is familiar. So many times I was laughing at the crazy wit this writer has and other times I found that familiar lump in my throat. I like how she heard her (dead) mother’s voice in her head. A lot of us can relate to that. All the different stages we go through are explored here in a very interesting way. Sad to find that the author wrote from some of her personal experiences but that is what makes this an amazing and believable book.