Saturday, October 28, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan



  In Other Lands is one of the best books I've read this year.  It's a Young Adult/Portal Fantasy/Coming of Age/Romance novel and it is totally and utterly amazing.  If you read my reviews, you know I place a strong emphasis on books having good, strong or interesting characters.  This goes double for books where romance or even just relationships are major plot elements - if a book can't make you care about what happens to the characters, you're certainly not going to care about a romance plot.  But when you do have strong characters who a reader can actually grow to care about, romance and relationship plots can be incredibly powerful.

  In Other Lands has three amazing main characters, who I found it impossible not to fall in love with.  It's a book with humans/elves/mermaids/trolls etc., but the central part of this book is the relationships and romances of these characters.  And with romance being a central part of this book, it became the type of book that made me incredibly conflicted in a good way - on one hand, I found it hard to keep reading because I didn't want to see anything bad happen to our characters' hearts, but on the other hand I couldn't stop reading because I wanted to find out what would happen next to them and I hoped so much for the best of them.

More after the jump and I promise I'll try to be more coherent about exactly why this book grabbed me so well.


------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------
At age 13, Elliott is taken from his school to a random field, where he finds that he is one of the few every day humans who can see and enter through the Border into the Borderlands, a magical realm.  Elliott is the opposite of your ideal fairy tale hero - he's weak and undersized, he hates the very idea of fighting, comes from a home where his father doesn't love him and his mother abandoned him soon after he was born....oh and his default mode of conversation is to be antagonistic and sarcastic to everybody.  He's smart but somewhat insufferable and terrible at personal relationships.

But when he comes to the Borderlands, he meets two individuals who will change his life:  Serene-Heart-In-The-Chaos-Of-Battle, a female Elf who wants to take both the Warrior's and the Counselor's classes; and Luke Sunborn, a beautiful super-athletic human male from the prestigious Sunborn family, known to all throughout the magical land as being full of great warriors and leaders.  Elliott immediately has a crush on Serene and feels that Luke is a stiff-necked ultra privileged jerk, but can't seem to get away from Luke, who constantly hangs around Serene and is one of the few humans who can keep up with her warrior prowess.

As Elliott spends his age 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 year-old years in the Borderlands (returning only to our realm for the summer), he learns that the culture of the Borderlands is often tinged by sexist and racist undertones and a war-first negotiate later attitude - something he endeavors at every opportunity to change.  But more importantly, he will spend these years forming relationships, both good and bad, and find himself trying more and more to find somewhere and someone who will treasure him with love.   Is there a Happy Ending for Elliott - and also Luke and Serene - in this magical but sometimes backwards realm?
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If that description doesn't sound appealing, I apologize, because I find it incredibly hard to sum up this book.  The book is split up into five parts (with no chapter breaks), with each part dealing with a year in Elliott's life in the Borderlands (and some of his summer activities at home or elsewhere).  In each part, Elliott finds the borderlands engulfed in at least one conflict and tries to use his own smarts and sense of justice to ensure those conflicts - with dwarves, elves, human bandits, mermaids, harpies, and others - are resolved (sometimes successfully sometimes...less so) peacefully and fairly.

But again, the real meat of this book are Elliott's - and Luke's and Serene's - relationships and the romances he gets into - with both girls and boys.  Elliott is crazy smart at developing treaties and at trying to find ways to resolve military conflicts....but he's incredibly bad at understanding PERSONAL relationships, and his default attitude of responding to people with sarcasm and negativity.  And since the book is entirely seen from Elliott's third person point of view, it can be frustrating to see him miss things that are much more clear to the reader.

But it's frustrating only because Elliott is a FANTASTIC character, as a kid growing in to himself, learning to love (both emotionally and well...sexually - there is sex in this book).  By midway through the first part of the book I'd fallen in love with him, as he's an incredibly believable and easily relate-able character who I really really wanted to find happiness.  But he's awkward and uncomfortable and always trying to interfere with every possible situation - for the good of others as well as himself - and often makes things worse as a result.

And he's not the only great character.  Luke Sunborn, the secondary male character is also just a great character to read - while Luke comes from his proud famous clan and is even at 13 essentially an incredibly capable and seemingly inhuman warrior, he's a little more shy than pretty much all of his family, especially when it comes to relationships.  Luke is gay (Elliott is bisexual) and thankfully, despite the sexism in this magical world, this not a world where same-sex relationships are in any way out of place.  That said, Luke is incredibly bad at trying to spit out his true love interests (Elliott is as previously mentioned equally bad at truly discerning them) and he's yet another character who you learn to really care about.

The rest of the characters are excellent as well - the third main character Serene is a hoot, even if she doesn't quite have the same development as the two human leads, and the rest of the cast, from Luke's family, to the rest of the Borderlands classmates, to the commander of the Borderlands, are really excellently done (the Commander is a deadpan snarker of epic proportions), all feeling fully realistic, which says something for a school in a magical land.

I want to make something clear - while this is a story in which our main characters on several occasions find themselves heartbroken or longing, this is NOT a depressing story.  The writing and dialogue is tremendous, with Elliott's internal and external dialogue often being utterly hilarious. I found myself constantly smiling at some of the lines, even in parts where I was feeling incredibly bad for the characters.  It's an incredibly delightful book to read, even for someone like me who cringes at awkward romantic moments.

The book isn't perfect, despite my score.  The book started life as a series of short stories posted freely on the web, and the last part begins with a twist that certainly feels a little disjointed, as if it is a start of a new short story. And the ending is kind of predictable since about 40% of the way in.  But it's still such a great ending, and the whole book is just so utterly delightful, that these minor flaws really really don't matter.  I can probably nitpick any book, but this is one of those books that is so good and delightful that the nits cannot justify me dropping the score.

Cannot recommend this one more.  Just phenomenal.

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