This book is 537 pages long. And I think it could have been shorter. Or longer! But it's trying to do a couple different things, and the combination of them didn't really come together for me.
Premise: Elliot Schafer is a genre-savvy thirteen-year-old from our world. His teacher takes him to a wall that only a few special people can see. If he climbs up and over it, he'll enter a magical land. He knows what portal fantasies are and figures "sure, no one will miss me on this end, might as well try." This all happens within the first ten pages.
Besides humans, there are a lot of different types of beings who live in the Borderlands: elves, dwarves, mermaids, harpies, etc. The teenagers who come to the border camp are in training to defend the realm, either (mostly) as warriors or (less often) as diplomats and treaty-wranglers. Elliot, a modern British teenager who understands things like cell phones and Pink Floyd, is horrified at the concept of war, and wants to become a diplomat. Unfortunately, the warriors are increasingly crowding out the diplomats, and peace is becoming less and less prestigious.
Even more unfortunately, we're seeing everything through the POV of Elliot, who has been neglected by his parents, hasn't made friends in the mundane world, and takes it out on everyone else by being as sardonic and cutting as possible at all times. He defaults to assuming none of the jocks could be as smart as he is, and quickly decides to address the attractive, athletic, popular Luke Sunborn as "loser," while also making fun of Luke for mispronouncing words. (You know who mispronounces words? People who learned big words
from reading books and might be too shy to use them in conversation frequently.)
He also, early on, meets the elf girl Serene (Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle), and decides that she's his one true love, the breeze in his sky, the sparks of his fire, the jewel in his tiara, and on and on and on. Elf culture's sexist stereotypes are the reverse of the human world: women are pigeonholed as being the strong warriors who just can't control themselves, and men as the delicate emotional nurturers whose virtue must be protected from scoundrel women. So there are lots of conversations where Serene is like "oh, Elliot's just a gentle flower, I can't be taking advantage of him," and Elliot is like "this is kind of messed up! Also human stereotypes are messed up! Everyone's messed up!" And, okay. We get it.
Because the book is so purposefully genre-savvy, we get the sense that things with Serene are not going to go as smoothly as Elliot hopes, there's a love triangle that's going to be subverted in the tropiest way possible. But not before a lot, a
lot, of adolescent romance and miscommunication and awkwardness. (And a lot more fifteen-year-olds having sex than I think is particularly representative of this generation.) This was the part where it was like...this could be a lot shorter because I can already sense where it's going, I see the trope beats, I'm not actually interested in teenage romance as an end in itself.
On the other hand, the premise of "everybody is obsessed with war, and that's kind of a problem, what this land actually needs is peace, and modern technology that works" could have been more intriguing to me. At one point Elliot theorizes:
“Has it ever occurred to you all that the books about magical worlds in our world might be lures? Shiny toys dangled in front of children so we go ooooh, mermaids, oooh, unicorns, oooh, harpies—”
Like, if the book had entirely leaned into that premise, people in portal-fantasy world trying to advertise portal fantasies as being more fun than they actually are, that could have been very funny and also very meta. I'm not a fan of the "
oh, in books it's like this, but this is the real world, it can't be that easy" trope--and "In Other Lands" does that a lot. Critically, there is
no actual magic at the magic school--it's just that a few people from our world can see the Borderlands, and most can't.
Contrast this with something like Harry Potter, which is probably the best-known example of the "kid from our world goes to fantasy world, it's neat, but also why are these children in mortal danger all the time, where are the adults" tropes that this seems to be trying to subvert. Hogwarts is whimsical! Hogwarts has owls delivering mail, enchanted hats singing songs, touchy ghosts, touchy chess pieces, talking portraits, moving staircases...these things are fun, and magical. (It also has Quidditch, but I understand that Quidditch, while delightfully whimsical, doesn't necessarily make a great deal of sense as a sport to people who like thinking about and analyzing sports. "In Other Lands" has Trigon, which is a game played by throwing a glass ball around. Since Elliot is so steadfastly intellectual that he finds watching or caring about sports utterly beneath him, we never have to have an actual explanation of the rules.) It feels like Elliot, or the author, is trying to deconstruct this setting without having a clear sense of what makes it appealing to begin with. From this vantage, I wouldn't have minded if the book was longer--if there were actually enjoyable things about this world, then the earnest contrast of "okay, but my world has technology that lets you play music, and pencils and pencil sharpeners, and also teenagers are not learning how to stab each other with swords," might have been less ham-fisted.
Elliot realizes that the warriors need him for missions so he can look for diplomatic solutions, but he's not really good at making friends, so it's basically a case of haranguing the authority figures until he wears them down and they agree to bring him along. He's definitely not the chosen one or the one who has it easy, but there's this sense of "oh well, the rules don't apply to me" main character syndrome that gets a little exhausting in combination with his overall misanthropy.
There are some genuinely funny moments:
Elliot was trying to teach himself trollish via a two-hundred-year-old book by a man who’d had a traumatic break-up with a troll. This meant a lot of commentary along the lines of “This is how trolls say I love you. FOOTNOTE: BUT THEY DON’T MEAN IT!”
But also descriptions that come directly from TVTropes:
Elliot did not know why the two most important women in his life had to be deadpan snarkers.
Side note: I read this right after "
The Winged Histories," which is
extremely different in its prose style. However, I was amused by the coincidence that not only do they both have the same publisher (Small Beer Press), but also, the last section of each book has a similar reveal about the POV character's endgame love interest.
Bingo: A Book In Parts, previous Readalong, Small Press, Elves and Dwarves (I expect to use it for this), LGBTQIA protagonist, Stranger in a Strange Land.
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