... joins the recent roster of impressive novels that have employed speculative elements to examine new motherhood ... Without any signifiers of location and time, Schaitkin’s narrative seems to reach for a sense of universality, and intentionality: as though every element of this carefully crafted theater has been placed there for a reason. It’s not what Elsewhere elides but what it preserves from our world that is the most telling ... Schaitkin chooses to leave intact our culture’s misogyny and reproductive pressures. Readers might long for a sympathetic, perhaps child-free outlier to reimagine, this female plight and bring some semblance of resolution into focus. But such an anomaly never materializes, and even strangers still reinforce the status quo when it comes to gender roles. Even as the plot completes a satisfying loop, Vera maintains the prejudices she had at the start and, most unusually, never questions her own certain motherhood. Perhaps this is the real speculative element: a mother with no traces of ambivalence ... A welcome addition to a shelf of speculative fiction about the joys, failures and metamorphoses involved in having a child, Elsewhere asks: Is motherhood, like the town itself, meant to be a featureless place, best experienced under a haze of collective brainwashing?
... Schaitkin creates a chilling, mesmeric world ... the village at its heart and the options of a larger world will stick with readers long after the final page ... unsettling, thought-provoking and lushly detailed, a memorable inquiry about attachments to place and to family, and what happens when a person has to choose between her family and herself.
Schaitkin is at her sharpest and darkest when depicting the anxieties and self-justifications of new mothers, their fears of being judged as unnatural or inept, particularly by other mothers, the standard of maternal excellence being as impossibly high in this misty place as everywhere else ... Although, frankly, the reader also struggles to understand the lessons of the affliction or why no one questions it. Even when Vera becomes an outsider herself, with a chance to gain some perspective, she doesn’t seem fully awake to the affliction’s weirdness or grow suspicious about its origins. (The local men, for instance, seem a bit too resigned to the possibility of losing their wives.) Like those oppressive clouds, the narrative is at times opaque, and perhaps some occasional humor would have provided a clarifying breeze. Still, at this particular moment, a novel that dramatizes the perils of motherhood, and challenges the idea that it should be all-important, could not be more relevant.
... simply stunning ... The prose is as magical as the haunting world Schaitkin creates; the story is as captivating as the prose; the characters, the imagery—flawless. The novel has social commentary and thematic strength to boot ... This novel is, at its core, a commentary and psychological exploration of motherhood, as readers follow Vera through parenting’s tender highs and most gut-wrenching, self-doubting lows ... Schaitkin’s sophomore novel channels early Margaret Atwood, a magical, otherworldly story certain to be on plenty of 2022 'best of' lists.
... a compelling, poetic, and chilling novel that examines fate and fear. The town’s unique and eerie culture indoctrinates its people, but Vera moves through this environment with both doubt and confidence. The mothers’ disappearances are also a metaphor for the pain and pleasure that come with motherhood itself.
... profound ... 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. This is a standout.
Vera’s Rumspringa stretches out about a decade, it seems, motored by dream logic through a series of weird situations whose allegorical import is unclear. Thankfully, the road eventually doubles back to questions left open in the village, some of which are answered ... An elaborately imagined yet not quite satisfying fable of loss and isolation.
