"People Collide" by Isle McElroy is a thought-provoking adult novel that artfully explores themes of LGBTQIAP+ identity and sexuality. The book's insightful narrative delves into the complexities of human relationships and personal journeys. Isle McElroy's skillful storytelling brings authenticity and depth to the characters, creating a resonant and engaging reading experience. "People Collide" is a powerful exploration of the intersections between identity and connection, making it an impactful read for those seeking a nuanced and heartfelt portrayal of diverse experiences within the LGBTQIAP+ community.

4.5/5

Well this was pleasantly unexpected. A body-switching story that isn’t the least bit funny. It’s bonkers in the best way and thought-provoking and its message and purpose is delivered beautifully i.e. not bashing the reader over the head and I am so close to loving it. It just dragged a bit in moments for such a short book.

Thanks to HarperCollins and Netgalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Honestly, this book captivated me. I started it on a whim last night, and I couldn't put it down today until I had finished it. I am not immune to litfic about complicated marriages, etc etc. But genuinely, this was a beautiful read in terms of being a very precise character study of Eli and Elizabeth and their relationship, and it was just deeply readable!! had a great time with it!!

What a thought provoking book! I was in awe of just how much this book shows how unfortunately unfair the world is and the differences the way women are treated compared to men. I will be sharing this book with a lot of people.

Major thanks to NetGalley and HarperVia for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review:

McElroy Freaky-Fridays Eugenides' 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘗𝘭𝘰𝘵 to create a complex story about the self, the selfless, and selfishness that hits a home run in every category:

Love ✅
Heartbreak ✅
Children ✅
Greatest/Most Interesting Sex Scene to Come out of 2023 ✅

Thought slow in its exposition, McElroy's tight prose and sharp characters create a beautiful examination of what it means to be every single piece of a person in a relationship. Every shard matters as does every glimmer that shard contains. What is broken is not lost, but found in the beautiful way our two protagonists understand each other.

A true triumph, and perhaps a favorite of 2023.

This makes up for all the obnoxious and juvenile gender/body swap movies directed by cis people I grew up on in the 80s (though Just One of the Guys still kind of rules, despite being hideously outdated). People Collide is a fascinating book that explores so much with its deceptively simple premise (two couples switch bodies after one disappears). Topics like intimacy, feeling foreign in one's body/relationship, the feeling of displacement one gets while living abroad, the traits we inherit from the parents and the way we grow apart from them, the differences between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us, the seemingly random ways the people come into our lives...I could go on and on about all the interesting things going on in this book. I loved McElroy's style and prose and pacing and deep compassion for the characters, even when they're messy/unlikable/brutally honest.

+This also has one of the best sex scenes in recent memory.

PEOPLE COLLIDE is such a hoot. I may have enjoyed it more than McElroy's debut---this is a brisk and rollicking good time. But there's a lot occurring below the surface too, particularly in terms of gender and intimacy. I loved this novel. Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley!

What can't Isle McElroy do? An incredible follow-up to their first groundbreaking novel, People Collide makes a body-switching between husband and wife become a wider examination of ambition, gender, sexuality, and family origins. I tore through this book in three sittings. While the end changes a bit POV wise, I was captivated throughout and truly couldn't guess how it was going to end.

McElroy has created such a strong, wry, and almost obsessively observant voice, the kind of narration that's easy to follow along with no matter where the plot goes. 3.5 stars.

There is something mystifying about McElroy’s prose. They have mastered a technique where everything seems almost clinical, in the way it is tight, observational, and doesn’t suffer any frills, and yet at the same time feels explosive, like it is only through a study of minimalism that we can contain the chaos of reality. Here and there we have these bright flashes of color, disorienting for the reader and the characters, but those eruptions are usually more felt as potentiality than realization, and there is something compelling about that. There are rich, complicated characters at the heart of this story, yet we only experience them at a remove, since they don’t know how to experience themselves. There is a plot, of sorts, but the events that happen are not as important as how they are experienced and reacted to.

I never felt drawn into this narrative, like I wanted to be there. Instead, it felt like a mirror, showing me might lay beneath the psycho-emotional masks most of us wear. The novel forces us to reckon with the fact that there is a vast gulf between the way we know ourselves and the wat others experience us—and, similarly, between our experiences/interpretations/judgments of others and the ways they understand themselves to be in the world. This limen, straddling perception and reality, or, really, multiple perceptions and multiple realities, seems to be somewhere we are frightened to dwell, confident in the validity of our perceptions. It might take dwelling in another’s body to learn something new about ourselves, something everyone else already knows. McElroy invites us to explore what that intimacy might look like, when identities can be recognized as contingent and fluid, and when we can find the compassion to make space to hold each other’s mysteries.

I want to thank the author, the publisher, Harper Collins, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I received a free digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was so excited for this, and was not disappointed. As a trans woman, I felt like the kitschy premise of a couple being body swapped could be interesting in the right hands, and Isle absolutely took it and ran with it. It felt like a modern Kafka / Camus story, being lost in the mundane details of someone else's every day life and suddenly feeling like every interaction is strange and altered. I thought this was deliciously amplified by combining the shock of the body swap with 1) the need to pretend to be your wife and 2) the need to look for her/him as she/he has absconded with your body and is not checking in.

Isle didn't just focus on Eli and Elizabeth either, instead using this opportunity to really dig in on Eli's relationship to his mother, strangers and most interesting of all Elizabeth's mother. It felt like these were both a metaphor for the trans experience - Eli getting to move outside of his body the same way a trans woman gets to move beyond her body dysphoria and see the world in different ways, without the haze of self-doubt. And I would be curious what others readers see here as well, it feels like Isle was using this inspiration (assumably) from their own experience but in way that was perhaps more universal, given what we see in the book from both Elizabeth as well as her mom too.

Finally, I would be remiss to not mention the sex scene. Eli and Elizabeth have sex and the bathroom and it is hot, messy and illuminating. I think I have a new found interest for books that are messy, horny and use that to say something interesting. Isle accomplished that and more with both the sex scene and their book.

Like everything Isle McElroy writes, I was hooked on PEOPLE COLLIDE from the first to the last sentence. Filled with their trademark satirical humor and nuanced yearning, their gorgeous prose and their ability to imagine intimate relationships in inventive ways, this novel is sure to be included among the "best of" roundups of 2023.

In a studio flat in Bulgaria, Eli wakes up to a new perspective: he has somehow slipped into the body of his wife, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth—along with Eli's body—is gone. What follows is a romp from Bulgaria to Paris to the US Midwest as Eli follows the clues of Elizabeth's disappearance and tries to make some sense out of what comes next.

Without question one of the odder things I've read recently, "People Collide" stands out for not asking the obvious questions. Eli and Elizabeth are together in an opposites-attract sort of way, with Elizabeth powering through on a Type A schedule and Eli drifting through life. In a subversion of Hollywood expectation (anyone else remember "On Thin Ice" with Tara Lipinski?), he takes his shift into Elizabeth's body in stride, sinking into the new body rather than questioning it and trying to both hold on to the commentary he imagines from Elizabeth and apply his own self to the experience.

"People Collide" is not a novel of a trans experience, exactly, but it is impossible not to see the connections. There would be *so much* to explore in a paper on this novel—if I'd read this as a grad student in a lit class I'd have been all over it for allegory and metaphor and symbolism. (Also, if I'd read this in grad school it probably would have been in a short-story format—in a way this feels like a very long short story.) You have to be ready to accept the unexplained and let the story take you where it wants to, but if you're in the mood for it those are some interesting places indeed.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

people collide is a love letter to mediocre people everywhere. eli is me, and i am eli, even though i wish i was an elizabeth. the beginning kinda dragged on a little bit and i took a few breaks every now and then. in my opinion, the story really started picking up when eli reached paris and reached a peak it didn't really fall from once eli and elizabeth reunited. i loved the exploration of parent-child dynamics, especially that of elizabeth and her parents (particularly her mother). of course, this was also a beautiful and nuanced exploration of gender, and i thought the way it depicted eli trying to navigate elizabeth's body was particularly wonderful. also, this is the first sex scene in a novel i've read in a while that is simultaneously sexy and actually purposeful??? anyway, 4.5 stars, highly recommend.

4.5 stars

Though this book was a bit slow to start, it kept me incredibly interested from the very first chapter. The premise is a fascinating one: a man believes himself to be in his own body, but when going to meet his wife at work — at a school in Bulgaria, where she is teaching through a prestigious fellowship — he discovers that his consciousness has inhabited her body. Meanwhile, his body — presumably housing her — has disappeared without a trace.

In my opinion, the book peaks midway through <spoiler>when Eli finds Elizabeth, predictably living as him, in Paris, and the two embark on a rendezvous through the city in which Eli is afforded greater insight into his wife and her desires </spoiler>. I also find the last chapter, which switches from Eli's POV to that of Elizabeth's mother to be enlightening.

Ultimately, my takeaways are:
- When you have shared enough of yourself with someone, you begin to reflect them in subtle ways, and in some ways are indistinguishable from your partner. And yet, there are parts of you that they can't even access if they literally become you. It's impossible to know everything about a person, even when you share the most intimate aspects of life with them.

-Parents like to think of themselves as knowing their children best, but the single greatest sacrifice of parenthood is not dropping everything to protect your child's interests. It is, at least for the parents in this book, accepting that you will not see all sides of your child, and therefore might never really know them at all. The moment that's really sticking with me here, is the final scene of the book where Elizabeth, in Eli's body, is demonstrating Elizabeth's characteristics to her mother. And yet, because she's in a different body, Elizabeth's mother writes this off as Elizabeth's influence, rather than recognizing her own child.

People Collide gives me so much to think about! Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Isle McElroy is such a brilliant, distinctive writer with such a specific point-of-view. I devoured McElroy's debut novel and was thrilled to have the opportunity to read PEOPLE COLLIDE early. Now September 19, 2023, seems too far away and I can't wait to bring this novel to my creative writing students. It will be the centerpiece of at least one of my classes.

The story never explains how or why married couple Eli and Elizabeth switch bodies--and this is a genius choice by McElroy. It opens the novel up to so many interpretations and invites a reader in to experience the story through their particular lived experience. As a queer, non-binary member of the LGBTQIAP+ community, I found PEOPLE COLLIDE to be an allegory for a transgender experience, especially as Eli took steps to "become" or to inhabit Elizabeth's body. The section where Eli turns to YouTube to learn how to apply makeup felt especially poignant.

Another reading could be that Eli and Elizabeth are one person, someone who is exploring gender on both sides of the binary. To say more about this one would give away too much of the storyline, so I won't.

I can't wait to discuss PEOPLE COLLIDE with friends, colleagues, and students. I highly recommend this novel!

I absolutely enjoyed this author's debut novel, and I couldn't wait to read his upcoming novel. "People Collide" did not disappoint. It's beautifully written. McElroy always does an excellent job writing characters that you end up caring deeply about. This novel won't be for everyone, but I enjoy eccentric and quirky reads. Eli and Elizabeth are a complex couple. Eli inhabits Elizabeth's body and vice versa, and their marriage starts to unravel after the body swap. It's kind of like a dramatic version of "Freaky Friday". This is not a flawless novel, but this book definitely delivered on the weird factor. Highly recommend!

Thank you, Netgalley and Harper Via for the digital ARC.

I absolutely loved this book. It's a gorgeous, smart, and sharply paced literary fiction set in Europe (Bulgaria and France) and midwestern US, following the lives of a couple who (for reasons never fully articulated) swap bodies. The book switches POV several times, including bringing in a parent's voice, which I think helped with the sense of quick pacing. This novel *feels* very literary in its weirdness and intelligence; all of the characters in this book find themselves a little smarter than they feel they get credit for, for example, but I think readers who love this sort of book will also feel they're a little brighter than is recognized by their peers. I really enjoy tongue-in-cheek humor and poking at issues like classism and the artist's ego, so the humor worked for me, but I can imagine not all readers connecting. I really can't recommend this one enough if it appeals to you, though!

Eli and Elizabeth are a young married couple, writers living in Bulgaria, where the brilliant Elizabeth has a fellowship and Eli spends his days waiting for her to come, pondering why he feels inferior to just about everyone, but especially his wife. As much as he suffers from self loathing, and comes from a dysfunctional family, with trauma in his background, Elizabeth and her family have a superiority complex. When something happens to upend their lives, everything they each thought about themselves is blown open. People Collide is mainly an exploration of relationships with self and others, gender, trauma, our similarities and differences, and the parts people hide from the world versus what they show or how they show up in the world. How we see ourselves versus how we are seen by others. Can we ever really know ourselves, or another person? These are heady questions, and People Collide kept me fascinated while trying to explore those questions. The only reason I didn't give it a five--there are small spots that felt maybe forced or strained, or untrue, where the author was trying to create two separate souls but they feel like the same soul. Still--I would highly recommend this book. It's deep and it's a rollercoaster of a read.

This was one of those books that draw you in from the first sentence. A welcome and most awesome quality for any novel, and most auspicious for a debut. It’s take on gender swapping was unique and fresh and just fun.
I mean, this wasn’t mere Orlando for our time, this was different in every way. With potential to say so much about gender politics, relationship dynamics, etc. And it did…to an extent. For about 55% or so. And then it sort of meandered.
Not a terrible thing because the writing is strong enough to engage even with meandering, but somewhat disappointing, mainly because the novel is good enough to verge on great.
It goes like this, boy and girl meet, fall in love, get hastily married so that boy can accompany girl to the Balkans of all places, and then one day boy wakes up in the girl’s body and girl is nowhere to be found.
Okay, girl and boy are not exactly accurate, these are two twenty-eight years olds, a vastly different two – different upbringings, different success levels, different drives, but still…They were kinda sorta making the differences work or plainly ignoring them until they couldn’t. Because apparently gender reversal throws a pretty significant wrench in the works.
It seems like the book should have said more, like it was poised to say more, but then just as it was getting into the meat of it all, it decided to take an easy way out. Maybe it’s because I was so immersed in the narrative that I wanted more.
Yes, it shifted perspectives and presented different views but never quite to the same level as part one with Eli as the narrator.
The ending felt kind of…resigned when compared to the story’s potential and most of its narrative. Like, is this it? Is that all? Definitely leaves you wanting more.
But then again, in a way that’s a compliment to the book. An overall good and interesting book that has a lot to say, even though it manages to say only some of it. People come together and stay together for different reasons, and it’s oftentimes an event random enough to pass for a collision. Dangerous or damaging as it may be, such collisions alter both parties. But then make for a good story. Featuring one of the best written, most plot relevant sex scenes I’ve ever read. That’s neither here nor there, but worth a mention.
Overall, a good thought-provoking, engaging read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.