When I saw this cover of this book, I was drawn to it immediately. It felt so barren and lonely that I had to know how the picture would connect with the words on the inside.

Madeleine Watts follows a married couple on a road trip, and through all of this the reader will experience a wide range of emotions. This is true literary fiction that leaves a piece of itself behind.

Told through a stream of consciousness narrative, Elegy, Southwest is a story of reflection and grief. We follow a young married couple, Eloise and Lewis, as they trace the course of the Colorado River during a two-week trip. Eloise is working towards a degree researching the past and future of the river, while her husband Lewis is dealing with his sense of being, following the death of his mother.
This is a beautifully written literary fiction. Initially it was a little hard to follow due to the unique writing style, including a lack of quotation marks. However, as I got into the story and into the flow it became difficult to put down.

Check the trigger warnings as it touches on many sensitive topics.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for ARC. All opinions are my own.

In Elegy, Southwest, a young couple, Eloise and Lewis, rent a car and road trip through the American Southwest. A PHD student, studying the fate of the Colorado River, Eloise is fascinated by the landscape so foreign from her home in Australia, while Lewis, an Arizona/California native, grapples with an environment he finds deeply depressing.

Flip-flopping between timelines, readers learn of Lewis’ mother’s illness, his brother’s attempt to cope, and Eloise fragile place within the crumbling family.

As the outlook for civilization in the desert reveals its bleakness, the outlook for Eloise and Lewis follows suit. A grief novel: for the environment and the relationship alike, Watts does a fabulous job mirroring the two stories.

This one gave me a lot to think over, and its apocalyptic warning feels timely and concerning, while the story of Eloise and Lewis is wrought with tension and suspense.

At times, it was hard to follow, as the fluctuating timelines are not given any clear transitions, though, as the story progressed, these fluctuations became clearer. I had a hard time figuring out how I felt about it as I read, but the story has stuck with me, and I think I quite liked it.

Elegy, Southwest is an excellent example of literary fiction.

Our narrator and her partner embark on a road trip almost a year after her mother-in-law's death from cancer, in order for our narrator to study the Colorado River for her dissertation and for her husband to check in on an artist for the sake of his work at an art foundation.

The narrator uses second person, as though the novel is one long memory she is recounting to her husband, having noted his behavior and increasing distance from her throughout the trip. He begins to rely heavily on marijuana for his grief, meanwhile the narrator reflects on ecology, climate change, and the artificial nature of the West using her outsider position as a native Australian to inform her fresh eyes.

The couple meanders through the West and through the husband's grief as our narrator keeps secret from him that she believes she is pregnant. The story meanders in much the same way, with the narrator likewise keeping a secret from the reader until much later.

I appreciated the way Watts interspersed a history of the area and references to literary theorists throughout the novel - while this may make the novel less accessible to some, I did not find it pretentious or hard to follow. The voice was consistently both clear and solemn, casting an eerie vibe on the road trip.

I would absolutely recommend consuming this slowly, for fans at the intersection of Justin Torres, Ruth Ozeki, and Joan Didion.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the e-arc.

Some books are love at first page. Some books are slow burns. And some books… well, let’s just say we had creative differences.

📖 The Setup:
You know that feeling when you’re on a first date, and everything should be working—you like the concept, the effort is there—but something is just off? That was me and this book.

✨ Things I Appreciated:
✔️ The premise was truly unique and very intriguing
✔️ The simple, eye-catching cover
✔️ The climate change focus

🚩 Where It Lost Me:
❌ The second-person narration style
❌ The hyper-specific chapter "titles"
❌ It felt impossible to get to know the characters because I just felt so removed from the story

📚 Final Take:
This is clearly just a me thing, because the majority of the reviews are glowing, excited reviews. So, take my review with a grain of salt. I truly wanted to like this because the premise was fascinating, and I'm a huge fan of any fiction with elements of climate change. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get past the second-person narration style. It took everything in me to actually finish this, and I found myself just flipping through pages at times without even absorbing the words.

So beautiful that it hurt. I almost wish I had read this in a single day, but I worry that would have been too destructive for me. This was a hard-hitting reflection on grief that I felt so strongly. When I put the book down, I had tears in my eyes and my chest hurt. The feeling of loss steadily builds over time until we hit a painful crescendo on the last page. Elegy, Southwest is very meandering and it took me a little to settle into the writing style. I struggled with the lack of quotation marks at times, which isn't usually something that bothers me. The stream-of-consciousness narrative also took time to adjust to, but it really fit the story.

As an aside, I highly recommend checking the trigger warnings (Storygraph usually has them listed) if there are any topics you struggle to read. There is one scene in particular that I think may be triggering for some.

I urge literary fiction lovers to pick up this book.

The reader is taken on an epic road trip across the southwestern US with a 20-something married couple (Eloise and Lewis). The author brings the physical landscape to life beautifully while at the same time giving us an intimate look at their relationship. We see the good, the bad, and the ugly as they weather grief and mental illness, job and school stress, and finding their place in the world.

The writing style is unique and a little hard to follow at times but, once you get used to it, I found myself fully immersed in this story. It's essentially about grief. Grief when a loved one dies and grief for our devastated environment due to climate change, and grief as a relationship unravels.

I finished this feeling both hopeless and hopeful.

I found this book hard to want to pickup and finish even though it should have been a quick read. I did enjoy all of the information regarding water and it felt well researched by the author. Overall I would give it 3 stars, still a moving story but I felt nothing towards the characters.

I didn't care for the writing style of this novel. It was very clunky and disjointed. I love reading literary fiction, but this book was so depressing and mundane that I had a hard time getting into the doomed marriage of a young couple. Very uninspiring and dull.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the digital review copy!

This one took me by surprise. Watts made me feel as though I were along for the ride through America’s dry, spacious Southwest. Her writing was able to evoke the stillness and quiet I expect you would encounter out in the middle of a desert landscape; that was just one of the things I loved about this book.

Aptly titled, Elegy, Southwest reads as a deep reflection of Eloise and Lewis’s marriage through Eloise’s memory. We learn all about their relationship, from start to present, while mostly focusing on the death of Lewis’s mother, his grief, and of course the road trip that follows not long after. We see how grief changes him, how it alters their relationship.

There are no quotation marks, which made me feel as though I were really inside Eloise’s head as she looked back over it all. Rather than feeling like I was experiencing these moments first hand, it was more like she was recounting these stories to me after the fact. Despite this, somehow, Watts was still able to make me feel present with her atmospheric writing.

I also enjoyed the sections about the history of the Colorado River and other aspects of Eloise’s research; I learned a lot. Some people might be bored by these detours, but for me, it was written in a way that kept me engaged and curious.

The combination of drying waterways and frequent wildfires with the struggles they were having in their relationship created an overarching feeling of irreversible damage and endings. I know that sounds pretty bleak, but Watts managed to make it beautiful and poignant.

Overall, I found this to be atmospheric, moving, and quietly powerful.

Elegy, Southwest is a bit of a slow burn of novel that you aren't sure where it's going to take you. We follow a young married couple on a roadtrip around the American Southwest. You can feel to dry heat radiating off the pages. Wildfires are raging in California (which felt quite timely for this read) and they travel through dried up scenery through multiple states as they drive to stop by an artist who is funded by the land art foundation Lewis is employed by. Lewis is tasked to check in on him while Eloise is researching the history of the Colorado River. Overhanging their journey is Lewis' deep grief over his mother's recent death, and feeling quite unmoored. You feel him slipping away as the book progresses. This book is an interesting mixture of reflections on climate change and love. It also employs an interesting structure where each part begins with almost a cheat sheet of occurrences that happen in the chapter.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster via NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for honest review.

Elegy, Southwest
by Madeleine Watts
Pub Date: Feb 18 2025

My first attraction to "Elegy, Southwest" was the beautiful cover! The novel is about following a young married couple on a road trip through the American southwest as they grapple with the breakdown of their relationship in the shadow of environmental collapse.

I found it to be an interesting but sad read. It deals with issues such as grief, loss, levels of abandoned relationships, environment issues, catastrophe and darkness and dealing with death.

Many thanks to #ElegySouthwest #NetGalley and #Simon&Schuster for providing me an E-ARC of this book.

Eloise and Lewis are traveling across the American Southwest, weaving through Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and all parts in between. They're young and married. She's Australian, and working on her dissertation that focuses on water rights and the Colorado River. He's somehow connected to the art world, there's a project outside of Sedona he needs to check on, and his mother, who lived in Phoenix, has recently died. So the two travel from New York to go on this roadtrip for a number of reasons.

The first person narration is from Eloise's perspective. She's in the future, describing the road trip scenes to Lewis, what was going on, what was going through her head, what scenes from the past were awakened, telling him what she kept from him during the journey. There's a lot going on, Eloise's narration is dense and colorful, you feel as if you are riding with them. Many many times I looked up sights they were visiting, from the Hoover Dam to the Salton Sea to Lee's Ferry to Colorado City. So much detail, from the music they listen to in the car (Metallica to Marianne Faithfull to Morrissey), to the smoke and ash on the windshield from the distant Camp Fire, the roadside attractions. The story is so rich with historical anecdotes (Owens Valley, uranium mining on Navajo land, O'Keefe), musings (how they met, got married, remembering Lewis' mother) and cultural references (they "visit" (stalk) David Lynch's house) that it just feels real. Their relationship, the dusty car, the convoluted route, the conversations.

Elegy, Southwest is a haunting novel, one that will linger. Hats off to Madeleine Watts for crafting such an atmospheric and authentic story.

My thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the digital ARC. (pub date 2/18/2025)

Thank you to Simon Schuster and Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts. I was very intrigued by the premise of this book and was excited to dive in. Unfortunately the writing style of it just didn’t click with me. I had a really hard time getting invested and ultimately had to DNF for now.

This book was exceptionally well-crafted, though I encountered a few aspects that I found somewhat frustrating. Certain sections felt sluggish, and there were moments of repetitiveness in the prose. That said, I was deeply captivated by the novel’s depiction of the Southwest and the immersive road trip setting. The storytelling possesses a raw, unfiltered quality that makes the characters feel strikingly authentic—though not always inherently likable. While I would recommend this to particular readers who appreciate character-driven narratives, I don’t believe it will have universal appeal. Its emphasis on introspection and character depth over plot momentum may not resonate with all audiences.

Kind of flashing back and forth in time between a road trip with a spiraling husband and a few other moments culminating in something I don't want to spoil, the narrator of this novel makes for a sympathetic and engaging voice. It makes you want to keep reading to find out what happens, even though you more or less guess the ending well before it is revealed. Kind of depressing, but overall, a good book.

I struggled with this character driven novel that blends the story of Lewis and Eloise with information about the environment-and I'm not sure that the latter works. Lewis is still mourning his mother, who died a year ago and Eloise, who is collecting data for her academic work hopes that their road trip will bring him back. She's also concerned that she's pregnant. It's a road trip book that isn't. The positives- the writing and the imagery-outweigh the rest but this won't be for everyone. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

This book was extremely well-written, but there were a few things that I found a bit frustrating. Some parts of it dragged and there were aspects of the writing that felt a little repetitive. I absolutely loved all the elements that were centered around the Southwest and the road trip setting of the novel. As a California girl, there were many things that felt relatable and relevant to me. I'm not sure if folks from other locations would feel the same connection to the writing that I did. I also really appreciated the raw quality of the storytelling; these characters are honest but they're not always likeable. I'd probably recommend this to some select readers, but I don't like it would be universally liked by everyone. It's definitely more character-based than plot-based, which just isn't for every kind of reader.

This book is a slow burn but it is so so worth taking your time with. I felt so immersed reading this. I learned a lot about the American sourhwest and the Colorado River while also watching a marriage slowly fall apart. It’s a book about landscape, and nature, and imperialism(?), and environmental catastrophe. But it’s also a book about love, and art, and mental health, and loss. Maybe above all else it’s a book about loss. My heart was entirely broken by the end of this book. With that being said, please read it.

Netgalley comped this to Death Valley by Melissa Broder, and it is similar except the husband and wife are both on a trip across the southwest. Eloise is narrating the entire book and speaking/journaling/writing a letter to Lewis, her husband. She is speaking from a distant future where everything happened has happened and more. It is unclear why they are apart for most of the book until the end and even that is a mystery. She talks about their journey from Vegas to LA and into Utah and New Mexico, places they visited, how Lewis and herself was feeling. She also tells secrets she kept from him during their trip. Lewis and Eloise navigate their own marriage perils and the death of Lewis' mother and his family and work. The pace of the book is slow but I liked that. It went the pace of a long car trip, where the roads wind around and not a lot happens and then a lot happens. I can't wait to hear other people's reviews.