21 February 2019
Elsey Come Home Review
From the widely praised author of Paris Was the Place--a shattering new novel that bravely delves into the darkest corners of addiction, marriage, and motherhood.
When Elsey's husband, Lukas, hands her a brochure for a weeklong mountain retreat, she knows he is really giving her an ultimatum: Go, or we're done. Once a successful painter, Elsey set down roots in China after falling passionately for Lukas, the tall, Danish MC at a warehouse rave in downtown Beijing. Now, with two young daughters and unable to find a balance between her identities as painter, mother, and, especially, wife, Elsey fills her days worrying, drinking, and descending into desperate unhappiness. So, brochure in hand, she agrees to go and confront the ghosts of her past.
There, she meets a group of men and women who will forever alter the way she understands herself: from Tasmin, another (much richer) expat, to Hunter, a young man whose courage endangers them all, and, most important, Mei--wife of one of China's most famous artists and a renowned painter herself--with whom Elsey quickly forges a fierce friendship and whose candidness about her pain helps Elsey understand her own. But Elsey must risk tearing herself and Lukas further apart when she decides she must return to her childhood home--the center of her deepest pain--before she can find her way back to him.
Written in a voice at once wry, sensual, blunt, and hypnotic, Elsey Come Home is a modern odyssey and a quietly dynamic portrait of contemporary womanhood.
| Title | : | Elsey Come Home |
| Edition Language | : | English |
Enjoy the book review !
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Not a terrible book but, how can I put it, a bit... boring....
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Susan Conley’s Elsey Come Home revolves around alcoholism, marriage, and motherhood. Maine-born and -bred Elsey lives in Beijing with Lukas, her Danish electronic musician husband and their two youn...
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There's something about Elsey you're bound to like.She's vulnerable and open, wry and perceptive, refreshingly blunt and self-deprecating-but most of all, she's hurting up a storm. When we first meet ...
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Elsey is a woman who is fearful of intimacy and goes so far as to lie or dissociate rather than deal with her emotions. She was once a fairly well-known and respected artist who sold her work regularl...
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She’s a wife, a mother, an artist who doesn’t believe in herself. When her husband Lukas tells her about a retreat called Shashan, she leaves her family for a week of rediscovering herself, waitin...
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Elsey is not fully inhabiting her life or her skin. She's American, from Maine, and living in Beijing with her husband Lukas, a successful electronic music composer and DJ, and their two young daughte...
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Elsey is a woman who, at first, thinks she can keep running away from herself. She gives up her art where all her emotions were expressed to try and be a mother. Essentially this is about unresolved g...
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Once a successful painter, Elsey can't find the joy she once felt in life. Married with two children, Elsey drowns herself in alcohol and can't find her place as artist, wife and mother. When her husb...
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This novel wasn't at all what I anticipated. It was beautifully written and in places, it felt lyrical in other spots it was frantic and yet in others, it stopped and moved very slowly. It took me abo...
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This spunky and surprising book is a meditation on motherhood—what it gives and what it can take. Why we put it off and also why we embrace it. Which broken parts inside of us it can heal and which ...
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