BookBrowse Reviews Homebound by Portia Elan

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The lives of a bereaved teen, an environmental scientist, a postapocalyptic ship captain, a faceless robot, and a video-game astronaut collide and intertwine over centuries.

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The many protagonists of Homebound, Portia Elan's debut novel, seem to live in very different worlds from each other—but by the end of the novel, readers will be struck by how much this isn't really the case. Becks is a midwestern teenager in 1983 who chafes against the narrow confines of her universe, going from the tense home she shares with her mother to the home of her grieving, dementia-stricken grandmother to her job at the record store, where she takes solace in punk music as a shield against the world. In the late 21st century, Dr. Tamar Portman, seeking to combine robotics and ecology to better study the environments endangered by global warming, codes humanoid robots that will be able to monitor those biospheres and moves from a job at UC Berkeley to one on a frigid, remote base in Alaska. Yesiko is a ship captain hundreds of years in the future, when much of the land we know today has been overtaken by water. She sails an ice-breaking boat called the Babylon, populated only by herself, her crewmate Root, and a ship cat named Panim—until two teenage siblings and their robot board in search of a legendary hero from space who is soon due back to Earth. And that robot, Chaya, has more humanity in them than they realize, and they are searching for a memory, though they aren't sure if that memory is real or imagined. From a few streets in Cincinnati to the wide expanse of the tundra to an entire planet and the atmosphere beyond, what these disparate heroes have in common is their interest in bettering their respective worlds—worlds that are more interconnected than they would have imagined.

All of these characters are united, too, in grief; Elan gently and delicately explores each character's bereavement in their individual stories, lending literary gravitas to an otherwise sci-fi heavy book. Becks feels adrift in the world after her uncle's sudden death and isolated from the rest of her family as they hide information about his sickness from her. Dr. Portman loses a treasured mentor and struggles to reconcile her own ethics with the rapidly advancing scientific frontier. Yesiko's entire story is fueled by her determination not to grieve, not to lose her father figure, whose injuries and illness make him reliant on expensive robotic medicine, the cost of which has marked Yesiko for death if she cannot repay her loans. Chaya grieves for their fading memories, for the natural world they once knew, and for people they think they remember, but who might never have existed at all.

This depth of character is a strong element of Elan's writing; another compelling quality is the variety of forms and styles she employs for the various characters. Becks speaks to the audience from a first-person point of view, allowing readers to access her innermost thoughts; Chaya's use of the plural first person "we," which they use to represent themself and, possibly, more robots like them, is unique. Yesiko's story, on the other hand, is told in third person, alluding more toward the emotional wall that the ship captain keeps up for most of the book. Dr. Portman's story is told entirely through her emails, the vast majority of which are addressed to a dear friend who has left academia, an epistolary mode that makes for easy reading and adds an eerie atmosphere of surveillance as we are given access to her private correspondence. I won't spoil how the reader gets to see the story of Lieutenant California Solo, a mysterious heroine whose rescue mission in outer space connects the rest of the stories, but suffice to say that Solo's narration was my favorite part of the book, in no small part due to Elan's unique style of presenting Solo's story.

While the stories are beautiful enough on their own, they do connect at the end, if only in passing or off-page. Due to the centuries between them, the human characters from the different timelines do not meet, although the robot Chaya, who doesn't age like the humans, is a link between them. As a reader who prefers a more wrapped-up ending, the finale of the novel felt a little bit unsatisfactory: I wanted more of a resolution to these characters' stories, although I understand why Elan finishes the story with vague gestures at their futures. However, the short game that Elan has coded—the URL for which is included at the end of the book—helped resolve some of that feeling of incompleteness and cemented the book as a truly fascinating work of multimedia art that extends far beyond the confines of the novel.

This review first ran in the May 6, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.