In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan is not a story that would’ve caught my attention based on the blurb, but I have so many bookish friends who adore it that it’s been on my TBR for years at this point. It also fit at least two tricky squares for my themed Bingo card this year, which was as good an excuse as any to pull it off the stack and give it a read.
In Other Lands is a romantic fantasy coming-of-age featuring an extremely prickly and equally genre-aware teenager crossing a portal to a fantasy world, where he joins a military academy and spends his time looking for love and preaching the virtues of pacifism. It’s a story that’s more interested in playing with tropes—both portal fantasy tropes and high school tropes—than in worldbuilding, with talented teenagers turning the tides in battle and a military academy putting on a school play. I have very little experience with fanfiction, but this is a mashup love letter to portal fantasy and school stories in a way that I suspect would appeal in particular to fanfic aficionados.
And the lead? He is absolutely insufferable, in a way that readers will either find endearing or grating. The novel plunges deep into his perspective from the very beginning and never pulls out, with grousing about mundane school problems on page one quickly turning into complaints about the dumb warmongering jocks in the fantasy world. It’s not all complaints—there’s plenty of fawning over a beautiful elf girl, and his commitment to pacifism genuinely does make a difference in the politics of the fantasy world—and the high volume of complaints still makes for a pretty entertaining narrative voice, but this is definitely a story about a sarcastic nerd utterly convinced of his intellectual superiority verbally bullying his way through fantasy military school.
If it stayed that way…well, the snark may still be entertaining, but I suspect it would wear thin after a while. But the lead is very much not a static character. He enters fantasy world convinced about the full personhood of dwarves and mermaids (which quickly extends to trolls and other fantasy creatures), and yet he constantly treats his fellow humans as inferior. And if In Other Lands is anything, it’s a story about growing up and learning to treat the people who regularly interact with him as well as those who he knows in theory and rarely clashes with in the physical world. And this growing up is intimately connected with the slow-burn romance that I mentioned in the introduction and have hardly referenced since. The hints are there very early on, but it can’t progress until the lead himself progresses—as such, the romance is inextricably tied up in the coming-of-age.
Overall, I liked the story, but perhaps not as much as some of my book friends. I often found the lead endearingly irritating, but sometimes he crossed into regular irritating. And there were times where the self-aware combining of tropes stretched my suspension of disbelief a bit too far. But it’s a fun and easy read, with a compelling main character arc. It’s easy to see why people like it, especially those who particularly enjoy trope mashups and aren’t too fussy about worldbuilding.
Recommended if you like: genre-aware portal fantasies, prickly lead characters.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Romantasy, and it’s also a Book Club selection that’s Indie Published and features Goblins, Orcs, or Trolls.
Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.