In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan

In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan is a standalone YA portal fantasy book that I picked up because it was shortlisted for the new YA (not a) Hugo award. It hooked me with the first sentence and, even though I originally had other plans, I ended up inhaling it in a day. Since it's not the shortest YA book ever, that did, unfortunately, involve staying up until almost 3 am.

The Borderlands aren’t like anywhere else. Don’t try to smuggle a phone or any other piece of technology over the wall that marks the Border—unless you enjoy a fireworks display in your backpack. (Ballpoint pens are okay.) There are elves, harpies, and—best of all as far as Elliot is concerned—mermaids.

Elliot? Who’s Elliot? Elliot is thirteen years old. He’s smart and just a tiny bit obnoxious. Sometimes more than a tiny bit. When his class goes on a field trip and he can see a wall that no one else can see, he is given the chance to go to school in the Borderlands.

It turns out that on the other side of the wall, classes involve a lot more weaponry and fitness training and fewer mermaids than he expected. On the other hand, there’s Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle, an elven warrior who is more beautiful than anyone Elliot has ever seen, and then there’s her human friend Luke: sunny, blond, and annoyingly likeable. There are lots of interesting books. There’s even the chance Elliot might be able to change the world.

Told from the first person perspective of Elliot, a sarcastic and hyperintelligent teen, In Other Lands is in part a scathing commentary on the moral and ethical ambiguity of a certain class of portal fantasy worlds. Elliot's voice is what makes this book an excellent read and so if sarcasm is not your kind of thing you'd probably best give this a miss. On the other hand, if you enjoy the deconstruction of portal fantasy tropes and don't hate humorous banter, then this is the book for you.

The one flaw I found in this book was the telegraphing hooks at the ends of some of the sections. I did not realise when I started reading, but apparently In Other Lands was originally published serially online, and I can see why tantalising hooks all over the place were conducive to that format. In the book format, however, I found some of these to be irritating semi-spoilers of what was to come in the following section. Even when one hook confirmed something I had guessed plot-wise, I was still annoyed by it. But there weren't that many that stood out for me and over the course of the book this was a relatively minor flaw.

The only thing that annoyed me about Elliot was his fixation with having/getting a romantic partner. However, this certainly fit in with how his character was portrayed from the very beginning and worked within the story, driving it forward in between external events. And it provided a counterbalance to the "Oh my god, we're child soldiers!" and "but don't you want to write a good treaty?" sides of the story. It does mean there's more sex that you might expect in a YA book, but it's all of the fade-to-black variety and certainly fits in with the world building (if you're treating teenagers like adults in the arena of war...). The fact that one of Elliot's best friends is an elf girl and that elven culture is pretty much gender-swapped traditional human culture, magnifies this aspect and also allows for some interesting discussion.

Overall I enjoyed this book a lot — as evidenced by how quickly I read it — and I would definitely read more books in the same style (although I don't expect a sequel for this one). The irreverent format provides and excellent vehicle to question some of the ideas that have been normalised in children's portal fantasy stories and bring others down to earth. I highly recommend it to fans of the genre.

5 / 5 stars

First published: 2017, Small Beer Press
Series: No (but there is a tie-in short story, apparently)
Format read: ePub
Source: Purchased on Apple Books

Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan

Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan is the first book I've read by this author. She's one I've been meaning to get around to for ages — I even have one of her earlier books on my TBR shelf — and when a NetGalley promotion for this one landed in my inbox, I thought, Why not? Well, actually, first I thought "Buh?" because the blurb in the spam and the blurb on NetGalley were not very helpful. The Goodreads blurb, below, at least tells us a bit of what the book's about.

Tell the Wind & Fire is about a young girl called Lucie who lives in a New York very different from the New York we know: the city is torn between two very different kinds of magic, and Lucie’s own family was torn apart years ago by that conflict. Lucie wears magic rings and carries a burden of guilt she can’t share with anyone.

The light in her life is her sweetheart boyfriend Ethan, but it turns out Ethan has a secret too: a soulless doppelganger created by dark magic, who has to conceal the face identical to Ethan’s with a hood fastened by a collar nobody but a Light magician with magical rings can take off… and who introduces himself to both of them by, for reasons nobody can understand, saving Ethan’s life…

The first thing you should know about this book that isn't in any blurbs is that it's riffing off A Tale of Two Cities. Which I haven't read but really should have realised from the opening line (which of course I recognised), but didn't for longer than I care to admit. The two cities in this book, rather than London and Paris, are both New York; a New York separated into the Light and the Dark and rarely the twain shall meet. The time period is alternate near future, I think. A lot of things were the same and technology wasn't much advanced other than involving magic. But it's not like magic was an especially recent discovery.

I quite liked Lucie, the main character. She was born in the Dark and had a crappy life until when she was 14ish and got herself and her father out into the Light. Now she has a reasonably good life with a boyfriend that loves her and safety, something she grew up lacking. Of course, everything falls apart in the opening chapter and the life Lucie thought was safe suddenly isn't. What I particularly liked about Lucie is that she's a survivor. Except for when she's actively trying to save someone she loves, Lucie spends most of her time focussing on surviving. Which isn't to say she doesn't do anything questionable, but she does try to make sure she is keeping the people with power over her happy. When several spanners are thrown into the works and people she cares about are in danger, she does the best she can.

I found the first part of the book steady-paced but not unputdownable. I wasn't bored, but I wasn't entirely sure what was going on or where the story was going. The last part (the last third or so, I think) was more exciting and with higher stakes. I had more difficulty putting it down at that point but, interestingly, I also found the story more predictable. I suppose I also liked the negative portrayal of the revolution. Lucie can see that the revolutionaries have a point, but the means they use to reach their end prevent them from being too sympathetic, which is a viewpoint I can get behind.

So I enjoyed Tell the Wind and Fire. Possibly my two least favourite things about it were the blurbs (so confusing) and the title, which makes sense eventually, but not the first time the phrase appears in the book. My favourite aspect was Lucie and the way in which her relationship with her boyfriend was an established part of the story. That is, they had already been dating for two years and, while the story gave them a bumpy ride, it was not about romance or relationship drama. I don't think we see enough of that, especially not in YA.

I recommend Tell the Wind and Fire to readers of YA who are interested urban fantasy, revolutions and stories of oppression. It's not the most formulaic or trope-ridden of YA books (unless riffing off Dickens is a trope) and, actually, I wasn't entirely sure it was YA until school was mentioned (another thing the blubs could've made clearer). I certainly intend to read more Sarah Rees Brennan books when I get around to it.

4 / 5 stars

First published: April 2016, Clarion Books
Series: No.
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley