soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2017-09-06 07:09 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2017-09-06 07:09 pm
In Other Lands, by Sarah Rees Brennan
I love this book SO MUCH. This book began life as a story the author published serially to her blog (under the name "Turn of the Story"), and I came across it back in the day and adored it at the time as it was then. The story got expanded and revised for publishing, and the published version is EVEN BETTER and I am so glad to personally own a copy of this book so I can hug it to me forever.
It is the story of a sarcastic 13-year-old nerd named Elliot who ends up in the fantasy world of the Borderlands and is supremely unimpressed with everything except the elf girl Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle. And then follows Elliot and Serene and their friend Luke over the course of their next four years, as they grow up and their relationships change in various ways and they get more and more involved with the wars and politics of the Borderlands.
The characters in this book are a total delight, as are their various relationship complexities. And it's neat to see the characters really grow up over the course of the book - Elliot at the end of the book is noticeably older than Elliot at the beginning of the book, although Elliot himself isn't great at recognizing how he's grown up. It's also interesting to see a portal-fantasy type story where the main character is not particularly impressed with the fantasy world he ends up in as compares to the "real world" but still prefers the fantasy world anyway for reasons to do with his personal life.
The plot is a little ridiculous in that Elliot basically singlehandedly saves the borderlands from constant war by making everyone write actually decent treaties with the other species. What, are there seriously no other competent councillors who he could have conscripted to help him in his mission? Yes, council training is treated as a bit of a joke by most of the borderlands but you'd think that AT LEAST his other council friends Myra and Peter might have had more of a role to play than just second-string friends. This also has the effect of making it feel like making all these treaties wasn't actually as big a deal as Elliot thinks, if Elliot could seriously do it all on his own as a child.
And the worldbuilding is also a little simplistic. The treaties are all between different species; apparently there is no intra-species conflict in this world, only inter-species conflict. Which seems more than a little unbelievable to me. We get to meet basically one group of each species. There's more complexities hinted at with mermaids at least (and mermaids are the species Elliot's most obsessed with) but mermaids are also the species that spends the least time onscreen in this book.
But despite these factors I still adore this book because it is very good at the things it is actually trying to do. It's funny, it's compulsively readable, and it's extremely good at making you care about its main characters. I CARE SO MUCH ABOUT ALL ITS MAIN CHARACTERS. SO MUCH.
You can read an exceprt from the first chapter here for free online to get a taste of what the book is like, and what Elliot's pov is like. (hint: it is DELIGHTFUL)
(Also, fyi, for people like me for whom this is a draw: the main character is queer and gets a happy ending.)
It is the story of a sarcastic 13-year-old nerd named Elliot who ends up in the fantasy world of the Borderlands and is supremely unimpressed with everything except the elf girl Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle. And then follows Elliot and Serene and their friend Luke over the course of their next four years, as they grow up and their relationships change in various ways and they get more and more involved with the wars and politics of the Borderlands.
The characters in this book are a total delight, as are their various relationship complexities. And it's neat to see the characters really grow up over the course of the book - Elliot at the end of the book is noticeably older than Elliot at the beginning of the book, although Elliot himself isn't great at recognizing how he's grown up. It's also interesting to see a portal-fantasy type story where the main character is not particularly impressed with the fantasy world he ends up in as compares to the "real world" but still prefers the fantasy world anyway for reasons to do with his personal life.
The plot is a little ridiculous in that Elliot basically singlehandedly saves the borderlands from constant war by making everyone write actually decent treaties with the other species. What, are there seriously no other competent councillors who he could have conscripted to help him in his mission? Yes, council training is treated as a bit of a joke by most of the borderlands but you'd think that AT LEAST his other council friends Myra and Peter might have had more of a role to play than just second-string friends. This also has the effect of making it feel like making all these treaties wasn't actually as big a deal as Elliot thinks, if Elliot could seriously do it all on his own as a child.
And the worldbuilding is also a little simplistic. The treaties are all between different species; apparently there is no intra-species conflict in this world, only inter-species conflict. Which seems more than a little unbelievable to me. We get to meet basically one group of each species. There's more complexities hinted at with mermaids at least (and mermaids are the species Elliot's most obsessed with) but mermaids are also the species that spends the least time onscreen in this book.
But despite these factors I still adore this book because it is very good at the things it is actually trying to do. It's funny, it's compulsively readable, and it's extremely good at making you care about its main characters. I CARE SO MUCH ABOUT ALL ITS MAIN CHARACTERS. SO MUCH.
You can read an exceprt from the first chapter here for free online to get a taste of what the book is like, and what Elliot's pov is like. (hint: it is DELIGHTFUL)
(Also, fyi, for people like me for whom this is a draw: the main character is queer and gets a happy ending.)