In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan
Jun. 17th, 2018 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsIn Other Lands
4/5. Expansion of an online novel about Elliot who goes away to school in another dimension when he's thirteen.
Elliot is a delightfully horrible little shit, and the story of him becoming incrementally more capable of forming meaningful connections with other people is wonderful. It's also a story of colonialism around the edges, and cross-cultural communication, and queer teenaged awakenings. It's great, basically.
Also, this book is a great litmus test. If a person calls it Harry Potter fanfic, you can immediately dismiss all their opinions since they clearly have no critical faculties. Brennan has a great note on the page above about all the shitty ways people have called this work fanfic. You know, where people use a perfectly fine and acceptable description as an insult. But anyway, this is specifically not Harry Potter fanfic. It is not in conversation with those books really at all. It does contain a boy-boy-girl friend trio, which to the tiny-minded is apparently enough? Idk. Anyway, my point is that what this does have is a fanfic sensibility, if you know what I mean. I.e. it cares about the things I care about in proportion to how I care about them. Specifically, all the complicated relationship stuff and also there's a plot which illuminates all the complicated relationship stuff. A+.
Knocking one star off for that weird phenomenon where the end of this book did exactly what I wanted it to, relationship wise, without particularly satisfying me. I think Brennan may have hamstrung herself a bit since she wrote this incredible long developed novel after a short story set in the same universe, and the short story kind of boxed a lot of things in.
4/5. Expansion of an online novel about Elliot who goes away to school in another dimension when he's thirteen.
Elliot is a delightfully horrible little shit, and the story of him becoming incrementally more capable of forming meaningful connections with other people is wonderful. It's also a story of colonialism around the edges, and cross-cultural communication, and queer teenaged awakenings. It's great, basically.
Also, this book is a great litmus test. If a person calls it Harry Potter fanfic, you can immediately dismiss all their opinions since they clearly have no critical faculties. Brennan has a great note on the page above about all the shitty ways people have called this work fanfic. You know, where people use a perfectly fine and acceptable description as an insult. But anyway, this is specifically not Harry Potter fanfic. It is not in conversation with those books really at all. It does contain a boy-boy-girl friend trio, which to the tiny-minded is apparently enough? Idk. Anyway, my point is that what this does have is a fanfic sensibility, if you know what I mean. I.e. it cares about the things I care about in proportion to how I care about them. Specifically, all the complicated relationship stuff and also there's a plot which illuminates all the complicated relationship stuff. A+.
Knocking one star off for that weird phenomenon where the end of this book did exactly what I wanted it to, relationship wise, without particularly satisfying me. I think Brennan may have hamstrung herself a bit since she wrote this incredible long developed novel after a short story set in the same universe, and the short story kind of boxed a lot of things in.
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Date: 2018-06-19 11:28 pm (UTC)Yeah same. (if you didn't know, Brennan used to write a lot of fanfic, and still does for all I know. Which is a recommendation in my book, but a point of mockery for a lot of people who like to call any original work people from fandom put out "fanfic" as an insult)