In Other Lands Review

In Other Lands review

This In Other Lands review finds Sarah Rees Brennan's novel doing something more difficult than merely mocking portal-fantasy conventions. It begins with a wonderfully awkward mismatch between person and genre: Elliot Schafer can see the wall separating ordinary England from the magical Borderlands, but he has none of the qualities his new world celebrates. He dislikes exercise, distrusts martial glory, talks when silence would be wiser, and would rather study treaties than train with a sword. That mismatch fuels much of the comedy, yet Brennan gradually turns it into the book's moral argument. A world organized around heroic violence may need the difficult child who keeps asking whether anyone has tried negotiation.

Published in book form in 2017 after the story first appeared online, In Other Lands follows Elliot from thirteen to seventeen at a school where young people prepare to become warriors or councilors. The structure lets the pleasures of a magical academy coexist with a sustained coming-of-age arc. Elliot's education is less about mastering a special power than learning what other people experience when he uses intelligence as armor. The result is a portal fantasy in which emotional literacy proves harder to acquire than any battlefield skill.

That emphasis makes the novel a natural fit for readers browsing fantasy for character-led stories rather than exhaustive lore. The Borderlands contain elves, harpies, mermaids, trolls, military outposts, and political tensions, but Brennan rarely treats them as entries in a bestiary. Each element matters chiefly because it exposes a habit of thought: who is assumed to be strong, whose vulnerability is protected, and why cultures repeat prejudices while congratulating themselves on being civilized.

A protagonist designed to test the reader

Elliot is clever, observant, lonely, and often exhausting. Brennan does not hide those last two qualities behind a layer of easy charm. His sarcasm can identify hypocrisy with surgical precision, but it can also punish people who have offered him no threat. His certainty that affection will be withdrawn leads him to reject or wound others before they can reject him. That cycle gives the novel its most convincing emotional tension.

The important distinction is that the narrative understands Elliot without automatically endorsing him. His childhood neglect helps explain his hunger to be chosen, but it does not turn each cutting remark into a secretly noble act. Friends grow angry. Romantic partners have needs that his cleverness cannot dismiss. He misreads people because being perceptive about systems is not the same as being attentive to individuals. Readers who require immediate warmth may struggle with him, but the friction is purposeful: the book's later tenderness works because Elliot has genuinely had to change.

His voice also supplies the novel's momentum. The comedy is quick, argumentative, and frequently aimed at the arbitrary rules people accept as natural. Elliot approaches the Borderlands as both enchanted visitor and irritated critic. He is interested in mermaids and libraries, unimpressed by weapons practice, and scandalized that supposedly responsible adults train children for war. Those reactions keep the magical world from becoming a decorative refuge. Wonder is present, but so is scrutiny.

Friendship carries the real plot

Elliot's relationships with Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle and Luke Sunborn form the novel's center. Serene is an elf trained for combat, magnificent in Elliot's eyes and confidently shaped by a society whose gender assumptions invert familiar human stereotypes. Luke is a talented warrior from a celebrated family, apparently the golden hero Elliot expects to dislike. The trio looks at first like a comic rearrangement of stock school-story roles. Across four years, however, rivalry, loyalty, attraction, jealousy, and misunderstanding keep changing the balance among them.

Serene is funniest when her certainty collides with the people around her, but she is more than a mechanism for reversed sexism. Her prejudices limit what she can recognize in Elliot, Luke, and herself. Brennan lets the reversal expose the absurdity of assigning temperament and social value by gender, while also showing that a discriminatory system does not become harmless because its targets have changed.

Luke's development is quieter. Elliot initially interprets his beauty, athletic skill, and family status as proof that his life must be effortless. The novel steadily reveals the cost of those expectations. Luke is treated as a symbol before he is treated as a person, and Elliot is not innocent of that mistake. Their relationship becomes especially moving because it is assembled from accumulated acts of attention rather than from a single revelation.

Romance matters throughout, including Elliot's bisexuality, but the novel refuses to isolate romantic fulfillment from friendship and self-knowledge. Desire can be sincere and still be confused; affection can endure while a particular relationship fails. The story's broad span gives these changes room to feel like adolescence rather than plotting. People try versions of themselves, hurt one another, apologize imperfectly, and discover that being wanted is not the same as knowing how to receive love.

Diplomacy as an active form of courage

The book's most satisfying genre revision is its treatment of pacifism. Elliot is not brave because he secretly becomes an exceptional fighter. He remains physically unsuited to the Borderlands' preferred model of heroism and develops a different competence: he listens for interests hidden beneath official positions, researches histories, notices incentives, and searches for terms that might prevent violence.

Brennan does not present diplomacy as polite passivity. Negotiation places Elliot in danger, demands preparation, and sometimes requires him to speak to people who consider force the obvious solution. His success depends on imagination but also on unglamorous work. The novel thereby gives councilors a function more substantial than advising the warriors after the exciting part is finished.

This argument works because the Borderlands are not secretly peaceful. Threats exist, and some characters are skilled at meeting them with force. The critique is directed at a culture that reaches for war before exhausting other possibilities, and at stories that equate moral seriousness with willingness to fight. Elliot's objections can be self-serving, yet they can also be correct. Brennan allows both facts to stand together.

There is a useful complication here: Elliot sometimes treats reason as if it frees him from emotional responsibility. He can analyze the logic of a conflict while ignoring how his words land. The book's growth arc joins his public and private education. A person capable of negotiating between peoples must also learn that friends are not problems to be solved or audiences waiting to acknowledge his brilliance.

The comedy has a serious target

Many of the funniest passages spring from the collision between fantasy expectations and institutional reality. A magical school still has bad food, repetitive lessons, bureaucracy, social hierarchies, and adults making questionable decisions. Glorious warriors can be vain or frightened. Mythical peoples carry assumptions as blinkered as human ones. Rather than drain magic from the setting, these details make the Borderlands feel inhabited.

The elven gender reversal is the most visible comic device. Men are treated as delicate, emotionally fragile beauties; women are assumed to be natural warriors and leaders. The reversal produces sharp jokes because readers recognize familiar paternalism in unfamiliar clothing. It also asks a more durable question: does noticing injustice when its direction changes help us see the original pattern more clearly?

At times, the satire's broadness is also a limitation. A reversed hierarchy can illuminate a prejudice without fully exploring how power operates beyond etiquette and expectation. Some nonhuman cultures function primarily as argumentative mirrors for Elliot and his friends. Readers hoping for anthropologically dense worldbuilding may find the setting strategically sketched rather than comprehensively developed.

That selectivity is consistent with the novel's priorities. The Borderlands are a stage on which received ideas about masculinity, heroism, sexuality, and war can be tested. The book is not neutral about those questions, but it remains playful enough to avoid becoming a lecture. Its jokes work best when they reveal a character's blind spot and then leave the character to live with the consequences.

Structure, pacing, and the cost of four school years

Organizing the story by Elliot's age gives In Other Lands unusual breadth. We see friendships acquire histories, not just origins. Small resentments persist; loyalties become habits; old assumptions look different as the characters mature. The passage of time is crucial to the final emotional effect, because no single adventure could demonstrate the same degree of earned change.

The tradeoff is episodic pacing. Conflicts arrive, recede, and sometimes yield to the next school term without the propulsion of a single quest. Readers accustomed to an escalating villain-centered plot may wonder where the main story has gone. It has moved into the relationships: the central suspense concerns whether these young people can stop repeating the defenses and expectations that isolate them.

The later sections gather more emotional force as earlier moments acquire new meanings. Brennan trusts accumulation. A gesture matters because of what happened a year before; a painful conversation exposes how incompletely someone understood a former one. This design rewards readers who enjoy long character arcs and are willing to accept that personal growth proceeds through reversals rather than a clean upward line.

The prose supports that movement with brisk dialogue and a close focus on Elliot's perspective. Because his interpretations are partial, readers often perceive another character's feeling before he does. That gap creates both comedy and ache. It also prevents the narrative from flattening his companions into rewards for his improvement.

Who should read it, and who may hesitate

Readers drawn to queer coming-of-age stories, argumentative protagonists, fantasy schools, and romances built across years are the strongest audience. The novel is also a good choice for anyone interested in how fantasy can question its own assumptions without abandoning pleasure, adventure, or enchantment. Its warmth is real, but it is earned through conflict rather than supplied as instant comfort.

The most significant barrier is Elliot himself. He can be deliberately rude, and the pattern repeats long enough to test patience. Readers sensitive to bullying, neglect, militarized education, or painful romantic misunderstandings should also know those elements shape the story, though the treatment is not graphically explicit. The humor does not erase the hurt underneath it.

Our editorial policy favors reviews that separate reader fit from a blanket judgment, and that distinction matters especially here. Elliot's abrasiveness is both a potential reason to stop reading and the foundation of the book's strongest achievement. If his early behavior feels unbearable rather than provocatively flawed, the later growth may not compensate. If a reader can tolerate the discomfort, the change has unusual weight.

Alternatives and final verdict

For another portal fantasy concerned with what happens after children cross into impossible worlds, Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway offers a darker, more compressed, mystery-shaped approach. Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is a stronger alternative for readers seeking lush language, fairy-tale invention, and a more overtly wondrous journey. Neither reproduces Brennan's combination of school comedy, romantic complication, and sustained argument for diplomacy; they are useful comparisons because they emphasize different possibilities within portal fantasy.

In Other Lands ultimately succeeds because its subversions are connected to its characters rather than pasted onto the setting. The pacifist does not need to become a warrior to matter. The apparent golden hero needs permission to be vulnerable. The confident warrior must question the hierarchy that taught her confidence. And the lonely, difficult boy must learn that seeing through conventions is easier than seeing the people who love him.

That last lesson keeps the novel from becoming only a clever parody. Its deepest interest is not in proving that familiar fantasy stories are foolish, but in asking what their neglected alternatives might make possible. Diplomacy can be dramatic. Care can require courage. A happy ending can depend less on defeating an enemy than on recognizing another person accurately.

For more on how UtoRead approaches source-backed criticism and reader guidance, see About UtoRead. The final verdict is strongly positive: this is a funny, generous, emotionally exacting fantasy whose loose structure is outweighed by the depth of its relationships and the integrity of its central transformation. It offers enchantment, but its most persuasive magic is the slow process by which a person who expects abandonment learns how to stay.