DNF Review – The Elsewhere Express by Samantha Sotto Yambao (2/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 369 pages
Publisher: Del Rey
Release Date: January 20, 2026
ASIN: B0F5PHR88Y
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: eGalley from Netgalley
Rating: 2/5 stars
“You can’t buy a ticket for the Elsewhere Express. Appearing only to those whose lives are adrift, it’s a magical train seeming to carry very rare and special cargo: a sense of purpose, peace, and belonging.
Raya is one of those lost souls. She had dreamed of being a songwriter, but when her brother died, she gave up on her dream and started living his instead.
One day on the subway, as her thoughts wander, she’s swept off to the Elsewhere Express. There she meets Q, an intriguing artist who, like her, has lost his place in the world.
Together they find a train full of wonders, from a boarding car that’s also a meadow to a dining car where passengers can picnic on lily pads to a bar where jellyfish and whales swim through pink clouds.
Over the course of their long, strange night on the train, they also discover that it harbors secrets—and danger: A mysterious stranger has stowed away and brought with him a dark, malignant magic that threatens to destroy the train.
But in investigating the stowaway’s identity, Raya also finds herself drawing closer to the ultimate question: What is her life’s true purpose—and is it a destination the Elsewhere Express can take her to?”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got a copy of this on ebook from NetGalley from review.
Thoughts: I really loved Yambao”s Water Moon when I read it last year and was super excited to read this new book by her. Unfortunately, I just could not get into this story. After struggling with this for a week and a half (kind of unheard of for me to be reading a book that long!) I was still only 65% of the way through and decided to call it quits. I found the world here incredibly hard to visualize and found the two main characters very hard to engage with.
The story alternates between three viewpoints: Raya, Q, and Lily. Raya is a daughter that was born to a family who wanted single child, a son. They got a son with a chronic health disorder and had a second child, Raya, in case their oldest son needed a transplant or something. When tragedy strikes Raya is left feeling that she doesn’t have a purpose in life. Q is an amazing painter who is loosing his sight. As he shuts down his galleries and wraps up his final painting project, he has no idea what is next for him. Both Raya and Q are riding the train home when they end up somewhere else on a strange magical train, the Elsewhere Express. Lily is supposed to provide all newcomers to the Elsewhere Express with an orientation, but from the moment Q and Raya arrive, nothing goes as planned.
Initially, I really thought Q and Raya were going to be interesting characters, I liked their backgrounds and challenges. However, once we get to the Elsewhere Express we get thrust into an extremely long and drawn out intro to the train that is confusing and constantly being interrupted by events that don’t make sense. I had trouble picturing this world within the train and figuring out what was going on. I tried to kind of “go with it,” but that just led me to being completely ambivalent about the story. Raya and Q as characters get lost in the odd world and background of the Elsewhere Express (both lost as in physically lost but also lost as in the location takes over the story and we lose the characters into the background).
The system and magic of the Elsewhere Express is still being “setup” nearly half way through the book. You don’t start to get an actual plot until about the 50% mark when you find out something has boarded the train that shouldn’t be on there. This really pushes any character development and engagement to the background. While I really love kooky and creative metaphorical worlds, this was a bit of a stretch for me to picture, and I really struggled to follow the story. This book should have been right up my alley, but somehow it missed the mark and left me floundering.
Added to all of the above is the fact that the chapters here are extremely short (most taking 1-3 minutes to read on my Kindle). This made the story feel very fractured since you are switching POV with each chapter. It also gave me a lot of chances to stop reading the book, which I often took because I just wasn’t that into the story.
I finally realized I am not at all curious about what will happen to Q and Raya, I am not at all invested in this story, and I don’t really care about the mysterious guest on the train. So, I stopped reading this. I find this really disappointing because I really enjoyed Water Moon and how creative that world wasy. The Elsewhere Express just feels like it goes a step too far in ambiguous world-building, and it feels like it leaves its characters behind. I normally give DNF books 3 stars, but I got so far into this one and had so many things I found disappointing that I decided to go with 2 stars.
My Summary (2/5): Overall this wasn’t for me. I loved Yambao’s last book “Water Moon”, but really struggled with this book. The characters seem intriguing at first but get shunted to the background once we board the train. The train seems like an amazing and magical place but then nearly half the book is spent setting up all the rules and magical properties of it. I ended up just struggling to picture anything and really not caring. I was thrilled to read this and left feeling disappointed.
