In Other Lands

I'm torn on this one. It started out so strong—hilarious and compelling. Unfortunately, the middle really dragged for me. Everything gets bogged down with angst and failure to communicate. The tropez (ha) get heavy-handed and tangled up. The ending was better than the middle, but I still think the book loses momentum over time.

I did like the ambivalence in characters. Elliot is hurt by people physically, but hurts people verbally. He's committed to diplomacy, but highly abrasive. Luke is an idolized jock, but also a withdrawn bookworm. Serene spends the whole book puzzled by the logic of patriarchy in contrast to elvin culture's intense matriarchy.
This added dimension, though I wish Brennan had allowed her characters to challenge their worldviews earlier on, and more substantially. Elliot was needlessly antagonistic...the whole time. Serene was patronizing...the whole time. Luke should probably have remembered Myra and Peter by some point. That's all I'm saying.

I think fantasy as a genre provides opportunity to explore culture and identity in really expansive ways. And in some ways, Brennan does that. Serene's matriarchal culture of origin shows how contrived gender stereotypes are. Elliot refuses to accept that interactions with those different than or unfamiliar to us have to be violent. Brennan uses several characters to normalize both queerness and its acceptance by peers and family.

Here's the but: talk about prejudices against dwarves and mermaids sits atop a background sorely lacking racial diversity. And then Serene's superlative beauty is repeatedly and explicitly tied to her pale skin. This is an issue in SFF as a whole, but it feels more obvious when a book is nuanced enough to tackle biphobia across several species and realms, but every human just happens to be white.

A few smaller gripes: on two separate occasions, adult characters pursue characters they know to be underage (because they ask), both times responding with some variation of “close enough!” I don't like that. A 20 year-old man was 16 year-old Elliot's first romantic experience with a guy. I don't like that. ALSO, the on-and-off again hyperbolic “I might not come back next year” from Elliot. That misery just doesn't make sense in conjunction with his misery over having absolutely nothing in the human world. I think Brennan was going for a “he feels caught between worlds and doesn't know whether he can belong or be loved anywhere,” but I had trouble buying it.

To end on a good note: I loved Elliot sneaking massive bags of technology to school every year, despite it immediately smoking, Luke saying he looks like “a snail that's about to explode.” I loved Luke and Elliot yelling at one another as Luke comes out in class while Dale holds his hand up for his turn to come out and Serene holds her hand up to ask a question pertinent to the actual lesson.

In all, this would surely be more enjoyable for someone who doesn't care as much about the things I care about. But I'm me, so here we are. I loved some of it, but it's not a favorite.