February 6, 2023
What Remains of Elsie Jane, by Chelsea Wakelyn
Chelsea Wakelyn’s debut novel WHAT REMAINS OF ELSIE-JANE reads a bit like Joan Didion’s THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, but narrated by someone who is not a cool customer, instead a human being wracked with pain and grief and lust and longing after the death of a partner from drug poisoning, a loss that has left Elsie Jane with a backyard full of weeds, an addiction to dating apps, and two small children who need feeding and caring day-after-day, and Elsie Jane is hanging on, just barely. Or not really at all…but then she decides to contact a space-time wizard via Craigslist who can help her return to the dimension where Sam lives and Elsie Jane’s life was still whole and functioning, and her biggest struggles were with Sam’s drinking and also the grief she carried from the deaths of her parents, back when she thought that constituted “the worst.”
This novel about death just pulses with life, with a force as compelling as the one that kept me turning the pages. It reminded me a lot of Rebecca Woolf’s memoir ALL OF THIS, about a complicated widowhood, brutally honest and beautifully human. I absolutely adored it.
