Elsewhere

Generally quite sweet young adult book with interesting themes around death and loss.

Another one with a weird age gap relationship between a teen girl and an adult man that goes entirely unexamined, though, which I am definitely not a fan of. The reverse ageing plot point seems to brush it under the rug, like the older man looks like a 17 year old boy therefore it's fine, but they still have their memories and the totality of their experience in their heads, so how is it not creepy for someone in their mid 30s experience-wise to be interested in a straight up teen girl? It's even mentioned at one point that while they're 9 and 11 in elsewhere, they would have been 22 and 41 on earth. But then they also do seem to regress into actual childlike mental states when they're little kids, so I don't really get it. Like their maturity level reverses as their age does, but they keep all their memories, and what is maturity if not the collective learning you gain by experience?

The concept just ended up a bit muddled, for me, but maybe I'm just thinking about it too much. As a young adult novel (which I have to say, I don't usually read) it examined the themes well enough.