From 1980s Cincinnati into the interstellar darkness, the stories of four women interconnect across the centuries in a gentle hymn to found families
T
his is the kind of book you pitch by analogy: JG Ballard meets Gabrielle Zevin; Isaac Asimov meets Stephen Chbosky; Ready Player One meets Love, Simon (replete with ferris wheel). I’ve been describing it to friends as a YA Kazuo Ishiguro set adrift in Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. It turns out I have two kinds of friends: those who hear that description as praise, and those who heed it as a warning.
Novels that demand comparisons rarely survive them. This one does (though it could do without that mawkish ferris wheel). American author Portia Elan’s debut is a gentle hymn to found families – the kin we choose rather than inherit – and it’s fitting that it reads that way, assembled from allegiances. Elan knows what her characters will discover: stories are how we claim one another.
One comparison feels indispensable: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas – that beloved, metafictional mind-bender. Elan is less oblique and tricksy than Mitchell (where he alludes, she underlines). But Homebound still has a puzzle-box thrill – the click of pieces locking into place. The family resemblance is unmistakable: four interleaved stories of four women divided by time, but bound to each other; their connections as cryptic as they are inevitable.
