“A teenage girl’s whole life is a collection of odds and ends.”

Lucy’s impression of Liz’s life as an assortment of “odds and ends” is significant for several reasons. For one, it anticipates the question Lucy poses a moment later, which will recur throughout the novel: what the purpose of an individual’s life is if all that survives of it is a handful of possessions. Relatedly, the description of Liz’s existence as a hodgepodge of unrelated items speaks to the apparent senselessness of her life, which (at least in her eyes) is cut short before she has a chance to make anything meaningful of it. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that all lives resemble the above description to some degree; they inevitably contain many things that seem painful or simply out of place, so the wisest course of action is to find what happiness one can rather than wasting time resenting life’s unfairness.

“Liz looks out the porthole that is parallel to her bed. Sure enough, she sees hundreds of miles of early-morning darkness and ocean in all directions, blanketed by a healthy coating of fog. If she squints, Liz can make out a boardwalk. There, she sees the forms of her parents and her little brother, Alvy. Ghostly and becoming smaller by the second, her father is crying and her mother is holding him.” 

In depicting the journey to Elsewhere as a voyage, Zevin draws on a broad range of cultural traditions. Peoples as diverse as the ancient Greeks, Norse, and Japanese have all depicted the realms of the living and the dead as separated by a body of water; many mythologies also conceive of the afterlife as an island specifically, which is the form it takes in Elsewhere.