Elsewhere Liz Hall, the Main

Elsewhere Liz Hall, the main character in Gabrielle Zevin's Elsewhere, is not quite sixteen years old when she is struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver. She wakes up after the accident and slowly comes to realize that she has not really awakened at all. She is dead and living a new sort of life, waiting to be reborn, in a strange place called Elsewhere.

At first, she is very angry because she feels her life ended too soon and before she was able to accomplish any of the things she wanted to do. As Liz adjusts to life in Elsewhere, she learns to appreciate the life on Earth she took for granted and opens her heart and mind to the lessons she can learn in Elsewhere. When the story begins, we find a character named Lucy gazing despondently around Liz's room.

The room is just as it was at the time of Liz's accident; no attempt was made to tidy it, as though somehow Liz would come back and use her things again. It is not until the next page in the prologue that the reader learns Lucy is a pug. She misses Liz terribly and hopes for some sympathy from other dogs when she goes to the park, howling "a dog isn't meant to outlive her human!" (Zevin, p. 6).

The other dogs run and play, leaving Lucy to her misery: "[T]he end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know" (Zevin, p. 6). By introducing Lucy in the prologue, the author foreshadows the reunion between Lucy and Liz at the end of the book. The close bond between the girl and her dog make Liz an excellent candidate for the job she takes in Elsewhere with the Division of Domestic Animals, where she quickly shows an aptitude for speaking Canine.

At the end of the book, Liz says good-bye to Sadie, a dog she has come to know and love. "I'll never have another dog,' Liz says firmly" (Zevin, p. 261) but she changes her mind when she is reunited with Lucy. By the end of Elsewhere, the reader fully understands the process through which the characters move. One arrives in Elsewhere and grows younger, rather than older, and eventually returns to Earth as a newborn baby.

Lucy and Liz do not have a great deal of time together, for Liz is now a very young girl and she will soon have to prepare for her rebirth. The reader now knows that Lucy's sad observation about one's death and to whom it matters is not true. During her time in Elsewhere, Liz made friends, including a girl her own age named Thandie, and a woman named Betty, who turned out to be Liz's own grandmother.

Liz fell in love, brought her grandmother together with her former rock-star idol, and found forgiveness in her heart for the driver of the car that killed her. Liz's life, and death, mattered very much to these people Liz met in Elsewhere. The book is divided into three parts that represent three stages of grief: denial, anger and sadness, and acceptance. In Part I: The Nile, Liz struggles to understand what happened to her. She finds herself asea, both literally and figuratively.

Nothing makes sense and she cannot believe she is dead: "I am dreaming, she thinks, and any moment, my alarm clock will sound, and I will wake up" (Zevin, p. 19). In Part II: The Book of the Dead, Liz is angry about the things she never got to experience while on Earth, including falling in love and going to college. She realizes she had not appreciated what she had: "The whole time she had been on Earth she hadn't considered herself a particularly happy person.

Like many people her age, she had been moody and miserable… in many ways, she had felt that she had been waiting for all the good things to happen" (Zevin, 76). During the second part of the book, Liz spends considerable time and money watching people from her old, Earthly life through special binoculars. She finds it difficult.