Elsewhere - Gabrielle Zevin

Biography : Gabrielle Zevin was born in 1977, in New-York. She graduated from Harvard in 2000. She has worked as a screenwriter and one of her screenplays has been produced : Conversations with other women. For this work, she was nominated for a 2007 Independent Spirit Award. She lives in New-York with her dog, Mrs deWinter.

To know more about Gabrielle Zevin, click here

Bibliography :

* Margarettown
* Elsewhere
* Memoirs of a teenage amnesiac (coming september 2007)

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Genre : Young Adults

American publisher : Square Fish : 6,95$

English publisher : Bloomsbury : 6,99£

Synopsis : Elizabeth Marie Hall, alias Liz or Lizzie, is 15. But she just died in an accident. She was knocked by a taxi driver while driving her bike. She wakes up on a boat, sharing her cabine with another girl, Thandi, who has a hole in her head. She thinks she's dreaming, but days pass on and she still doesn't wake up. The boat lands on Elsewhere, where Liz is awaited by her grand-mother, Betty. When she understands that she's dead and she'll never go back to her previous life, Liz is depressed. She spends all her days observing her family and friends on Earth, until she meets Owen. And she realises that a new life is offering to her. She can still pass her driver's exam, fall in love, but she'll age backward, until she's a baby again and can cross the river that will lead her to a new life on Earth.

What I think : Elsewhere is a really great book. We all have once in our lives asked ourselves what was after life, how was death. Is there a paradise, a hell, or simply nothing? This book presents a charming view of the idea of life after life. I'd like to think my dead loved ones are in Elsewhere, living there life there, waiting to come back. It would be a reassuring idea, I think. And after all, it would be logical somewhere to age backward and become a baby again, because when we grow old, in a way that's what happens, we lose our teeth, our hair, we got wrinkles, and we lose our minds;o)