"Schaitkin has written a compelling, poetic, and chilling novel that examines fate and fear." - Booklist (starred review) This is a standout." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Schaitkin returns with the profound story of a remote mountain village defined by the routine disappearances of mothers.Schaitkin gives the goings-on great substance by digging into the complicated feelings brought on by motherhood and the judgments from others, all the while delineating the mothers' utter joy, frustrations, and love for their children. Provocative and hypnotic, Alexis Schaitkin's Elsewhere is at once a spellbinding revelation and a rumination on the mysterious task of motherhood and all the ways in which a woman can lose herself to it the self-monitoring and judgment, the doubts and unknowns, and the legacy she leaves behind. When motherhood comes for Vera, she is faced with the question: will she be able to stay and mother her beloved child, or will she disappear? Reveling in their gossip, they witness each other in motherhood, waiting for signs: this one devotes herself to her child too much, this one not enough―that must surely draw the affliction's gaze. As her peers begin to marry and become mothers, they speculate about who might be the first to go, each wondering about her own fate. Vera, a young girl when her own mother went, is on the cusp of adulthood herself.
It is the exquisite pain and intrinsic beauty of their lives it sets them apart from people elsewhere and gives them meaning. This town, fiercely protective, brutal and unforgiving in its adherence to tradition, faces a singular affliction: some mothers vanish, disappearing into the clouds. Vera grows up in a small town, removed and isolated, pressed up against the mountains, cloud-covered and damp year-round. Richly emotive and darkly captivating, with elements of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and the imaginative depth of Margaret Atwood, Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin conjures a community in which girls become wives, wives become mothers and some of them, quite simply, disappear.
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