Homebound is sentimental, soft-hearted and guileless – the adjectives critics tend to use sneeringly, as though kindness were easy. It’s the sort of book that might have kept my younger self company. I’m glad this generation will have it.
If the marketing copy for Portia Elan’s Homebound seems opaque, it’s because even the briefest plot summary risks spoilers, and part of the pleasure of this book lies in the way its storylines come together ... The rare book to break through my multiple-timeline fatigue ... In a moment when I often find myself reading for escape—reading, in essence, to leave this reality for a little while—Homebound made me want to stay.
Even in its speculative reach, it keeps circling familiar Jewish concerns: how people endure, how tradition adapts, and how stories reverberate across time ... Readers drawn to structurally ambitious, multi-timeline fiction will likely be more fully in step with the novel’s rhythm, and more patient with its delayed convergence. Readers might wish they had more space to live inside each character and world, though the scale of a novel like this and the coordination it requires makes that understandably challenging ... Impressive in its specificity ... The future she imagines feels, unnervingly, less like invention than an extension — of the flooding, addiction, economic precarity, and fraying community in the present.
The magic of Elan’s novel is the fact that as it unfolds, the story of Homebound the game is unfolding too, linking readers of Elan’s book with the fictional readers within it ... Quiet, smoothly written, and deeply internal, this is a gift to readers who enjoy the act of story-creation, -telling, and -experiencing.
Elan’s novel offers an epic journey across time and space wrapped in a mystery ... Unique and complex, this novel tells an unexpectedly moving story of love, loss, and how the past shapes—and haunts—our present ... An ingenious narrative that explores the meaning of love and interconnectedness across time.
Elan’s magnificent debut traces the reverberations of a computer game on the work of late-21st-century ecologists and seafaring migrants in the distant future ... Elan intersperses the sprawling epic with fascinating ontological discussions on the nature of life ... It’s a marvel.
