The Elsewhere Express
❤️❤️❤️
(Spoiler free: everything mentioned is in the book description)
I’ll be honest. I only bought this book for the cover.
I know, I know, you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. But if that were really true, they wouldn’t make the covers so gorgeous.
It was also on a discount at my favorite local bookstore. I was technically supposed to buy it and then show up later that month for a book club. I swear I was going to go and discuss it, but I got distracted and the book got shoved to the back of my mind.
Worst part is I was at the bookstore when the book club was happening…
Regardless, I did get around to reading the book. I actually finished it while on a trip in Iceland. It was really the most picturesque place to read a book.
I want to say I enjoyed the book as much as the trip, but it was honestly a bit of a disappointment.
When I first read the description of this book, I thought it would be a lot like The Lost by Sarah Beth Durst (one of my all-time favorite authors by the way).
Both books center around the idea of purposeful forgetting in order to get through life and how that can harm you in the long run.
Both books the main characters get transported to a place that they cannot get out of. In The Lost, this place is run-down and dingy. A place that was scary to the main character at first.
In The Elsewhere Express, Raya and Q, the main characters, get transported to a train that defies all logic and is outfitted with anything they could ever want.
Honestly, while I was reading, I couldn’t help thinking how amazing it would be to escape all my problems and just live on the train. Sadly, it doesn’t exist in real life. As far as I know, at least.
Raya and Q’s journey in this book has a lot of ups and downs, but it always comes back to baggage. Specifically, Raya’s baggage.
That brings me to the first way the book disappointed me.
Q’s story had a lot of potential, but I feel like he existed only to comfort Raya. Even the chapters that were from Q’s perspective were all about Raya. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but the description as well as his back story made it seem like they were equally important and this was just not the case.
If we ignore how overlooked Q is, Samantha Sotto Yambao handled grief really well in this story. Raya lost her brother before the story started and her journey with accepting her role in his death and how it affected her was beautiful. If the story had just been a journey with grief, then I would have given it a higher rating and would feel more comfortable recommending it to people.
But The Elsewhere Express strays from this plot and even from the plot of finding purpose in life, which was another big thing for this book.
Unfortunately, the plot gets convoluted at the end. I closed this book feeling confused and wanting more instead of the satisfied feeling that I crave after reading a book that is repeatedly described as an escape from a mundane world.
Several times I thought to myself how is there so many pages left; this is the perfect ending right here.
That’s not to say that books can’t leave you feeling unsatisfied, there are many books where that is the purpose of them. Where they are supposed to make you uncomfortable and rethink your ideas of the world. It just didn’t feel like that is what The Elsewhere Express was trying to do.
All in all, I did like majority of the book.
The prose is beautiful the whole way through and the idea of a train that runs on thoughts was amazingly well-thought out. If it weren’t for the ending and Q’s lack of character, in other words if this was just a books on Raya’s grief, I would have liked it a lot more.
But as it stands, this book just missed the mark for me.
If you like complicated twist endings, I would 100% recommend picking this book up. Honestly, I would reread it, not for the plot, but just to get another taste of Samantha Sotto Yambao’s prose. It really was refreshingly beautiful, just like the cover.
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