A Book Club friend recommended In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan some time ago, and I finally got to reading it in the last couple weeks.  I’m glad I finally did, because it was funny, insightful and very original, while commenting on so many familiar story tropes.  Excellent read!

The story centers on Elliot, a boy from what we’d recognize as the real world, who has the chance at age thirteen to cross a magical wall into a country wholly separate and secret from the world he knows, where magical creatures abound.  He’s invited to join the Border Camp, launching us into something that somewhat resembles many other stories of children going away to magic school.  Except – Elliot is obnoxious, sarcastic, and cuts right through any pleasant fantasies.  He’s wildly indignant that they have no pens or central heating, and when he realizes they’re being trained for war promptly observes that they’re being turned into child soldiers.  Which is…actually quite true, but something I’ve never seen put so bluntly in any magical book!

Elliot only agrees to stay because he meets Serene, an elf maiden.  Her full name is Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle.  Elliot thinks this is the most badass thing he’s ever heard, falls promptly in love, and agrees to remain.  Also, maybe he’ll get to meet mermaids.

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Last year, when I was trying to read more love stories, One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid, made it onto my list.  It didn’t actually get read until this year, which is in a way too bad–because it was very good!  But even if it didn’t serve my “read more love stories” goal of last year, it’s meeting this year’s “read that To Be Read list” goal instead.

The book has a great opening line: “I am finishing up dinner with my family and my fiance when my husband calls.”  We swiftly learn that Emma, our protagonist, lost her husband Jesse in a helicopter crash a few years previous–but now Jesse has been found in the Pacific, and is coming home.  The book then flashes back to the beginning of Emma’s romance with Jesse in high school, follows them through college, marriage and Jesse’s “death,” Emma’s grief and how she eventually finds new love with Sam, the fiance of the opening line.  And then we return to Jesse’s return, and what Emma is going to do now, with two men she deeply loves.

I am not usually one for triangles, but this was the rare case where it really worked for me.  The concept of how this all came about was intriguing, and I liked that it’s a really difficult situation that was no one’s fault.  In some ways it’s an implausible situation, but it was written with such emotional truth that whether Jesse could survive in the Pacific felt largely irrelevant.  And as Reid says in an interview at the back of my copy, this isn’t a story about a man’s adventure to get home–this is about the woman left behind.

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