What a weird book. ( )

This was my second attempt at reading a book by Alexis Schaitkin and after reading this, I don't think she writes the kind of stories that click with me. I really didn't like her book, Saint X, and I didn't much like this one either.
I wanted to like it and it had some good parts to it, but I couldn't quite get into it. I was a little lost and not sure what I was reading when I was reading it and didn't know what I had read after I was done with it.
This book was better than Saint X. Despite that, it was a bit too weird for my liking. There was also some material in this story that bothered me with the sexual info and the perverted glimpse into the intimacy of a married couple.
This story had to do a lot with mothers and motherhood, mothers disappearing in a small town in the middle of nowhere that seemed to be like its own world, separate from the normal world. I also didn't understand or like the sucking of the blood bits during intimate moments. There was a lot that wasn't explained very well and left me a bit confused, so it just wasn't my cup of tea.
Thanks to Celadon Books and NetGalley for letting me read and review this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. ( )

High above the world in a mountain range is a town, populated by people who have lived in isolation for a long as anyone remembers. They don’t know how they got there and they don’t have any knowledge of the town’s origins; they just know that the names of streets and other landmarks are in a language they don’t speak. The unnamed town has an affliction: sometimes, even in the split-second between turning away and glancing back, a mother disappears. She no longer is, and the town closes the hole she leaves so efficiently that it’s as if she never was.

The most brilliantly written books are the hardest to review; it’s so easy to fall into a weak imitation of the cadence of the author’s perfect prose or to draw comparisons that have already been made by others. It’s challenging to write a review that doesn’t sound like a book report. So, I will share some brief personal reflections, breaking the cardinal rule of avoiding first person references, because I’ve wasted enough energy trying to figure out how to avoid “I” (which is a disappearance in itself, I suppose):

As a mother, I had the sense of disappearing when my son was an infant; I could not define myself outside of my role as a mother. I took some steps that affirmed my worth as a person. Vera, the first-person narrator of Elsewhere, did something similar, but for different reasons and with a much more drastic outcome.

As a daughter, I watched my mother disappear as she fought through ten years with Alzheimer’s disease, effectively erasing “Mom” in my memory – for now – and replacing her with Kitty who couldn’t speak but who smiled with her eyes. There is a parallel in the book (not Alzheimer’s-related), but to say more would be to venture into spoiler territory. To be clear, this is not a book about Alzheimer’s and there is not even a remote reference to any kind of dementia in the story.

My siblings and I talk ourselves out of our worries about contracting the disease by listing factors that might have predisposed her, much as the remaining mothers in Elsewhere look for (or manufacture) faults in every mother who vanishes in an effort to reassure themselves that they won’t be next.

Alexis Schaitkin’s brutal story of motherhood, affliction, forgetting, and remembering holds such universal truth that it will spark deep reactions for all readers. It won’t disappear, and it won’t easily be forgotten.

Thank you to NetGalley and Celadon Books for an ARC of this book. I used it to write my honest, if inadequate, review. ( )

In an unnamed town, isolated from the rest of the world, life seems idyllic, but every now and then, a mother disappears. It's always a mother. No one knows why they vanish--they call it their "affliction"--but they accept it as a necessary part of their life in the town, which has to be better than life elsewhere. The story is narrated by Vera, whose mother is one of the vanished and who grows up to become a mother herself, and one day senses that she too is disappearing. And then she makes a choice. The story reminded me a lot of Shirley Jackson, particularly [The Lottery], and of [The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas] by Ursula K. Le Guin. The writing was beautiful and atmospheric, and the story itself had the quality of a fable. Yet another book about the dark side of motherhood, which is emerging as a theme in my reading this year. ( )

In the same vein as Shirley Jackson and Margret Atwood, this dystopian novel has a lot to say about motherhood and identity. High in the mountains lay an isolated community where every so often a mother would disappear. It was quite common, in fact it was expected. Some mornings the women all woke up and felt themselves pulled along until they came to the house of whomever had disappeared. A father clutching his children would come outside and the women would go in and remove every trace of her, all her personal items would be taken to the op shop - all her photos and anything written in her hand would be burned. Soon she would be forgotten. When Vera is young, her mother is one of the ones who disappeared. She settled into a solitary routine with her father and two friends until one day a stranger came to town. Not once in her lifetime had someone other than Mr. Phillips (their supplier) come to town. Can the stranger be trusted? What does it mean. For Vera, everything will change. Weird, unique, and affecting. ( )