This was a sweet readable book offering a novel suggestion for the afterlife – the recently deceased wake on a type of cruise ship headed for Elsewhere where they might meet friends and relatives who predeceased them. In Elsewhere you arrive the age you were when you died, and then age backward – ie. get younger until at seven days old, you are swaddled in slowly dissolving strips and launched into the river of current which takes a week to get back to earth where you are ‘born again’ as a new person.
15 year old Liz died in a hit and run collision and lives in Elsewhere with the grandmother she never met in life because she died when Liz’s mum was expecting her.
In Elsewhere there are things like the viewers they used to have at the seaside where you put in a coin and look at the distance which allow the dead to watch the living. Liz becomes obsessed partly with watching her family and partly with finding out who killed her. She has to go through a kind of grieving process for the life she left behind, and the fact that she will never be older than 15 (in fact she will get younger, so will always be a child) and the book takes us through her stages (anger, denial, acceptance etc) in quite a nice and thoughtful way.
I don’t really get the point of reincarnation as a belief if the person has no knowledge of having lived before – isn’t that just the same as one person ending and a new person beginning? Some people might disagree with me, I know – just my opinion.
Sarah Wray Writer 