REVIEW: Borderland
May. 30th, 2025 07:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllBorderland: Rhiannon Lassiter, Oxford University Press, 2003.
I picked this up at a charity shop because the blurb seemed quite interesting (looking back at it, it only gives a taste of what’s in the book, but it was effective.) Three strands are introduced, first of all we’re in a Great Library (I’m reading two other fantasy series about such Libraries.) There we are introduced to mysterious twins, Charm and Ciren, who are given a mission by the much older members of their faction. Next up, we’re back in our world with Zoë Kaul, a soldier’s daughter, at the end of her first term at her latest school in Waybridge, England, still an outsider despite her best efforts. While leaving the school grounds, she overhears an angry encounter between Laura, the kind of girl she’d like to befriend, and Morgan, who is a bit of a Goth and definitely not someone Zoë wants to have anything to do with. Thirdly, we are introduced to the 16-year-old ruler of Shattershard, Kal, worried about the Hajhim, nomads and warriors who have been increasingly attacking the trade to his mountainside citadel, and to one of the Hajhim, Jhezra, a young girl who has become more important among her people, respected by the warriors, because of her connection to the revered Iskander.
All these strands some together quite soon, and my interest in the story kicked up a notch. While I disdained Zoë’s attitude towards popularity, as we follow her home to the base, where her widowed father is away, we see why she wants to fit in. A party gives Zoë a chance to go to Laura’s house, and when Laura and her brother offer to show her something, she agrees. What that is is a Door to the desert just outside Shattershard, where Zoë learns that Alex, Laura and Morgan have been visiting, mixing, getting accepted, although in different ways and with different people, for a while.
There are a lot of moving parts. We’re aware of more than Zoë, privy to the concerns of Kal, such as the demands of the Tetrarchate, the Great Power of this world, and interactions between the twins and Morgan, and others. When, overwhelmed, Zoë returns to our world, having promised not to tell about the Door, there’s a lot for her to process, and the draw of a whole other world is impossible to resist. But when she returns, things have moved on, with what Alex and Laura perhaps thought of as a game having unintended ramifications. New alliances are forged, with two girls willing to protect their boyfriends, and Zoë realising the truth of her father’s advice about her having to make her own choices.
I found the opening chapter generic, and then I got a bit twitchy about the handling of race (the Hajhim are darker skinned than the people of Shattershard, and all the World Travellers are white). This is somewhat addressed by Zoë’s growing awareness of this issue, as someone who has travelled our world as a ‘military brat’, although the book was published before sensitivity readers were a thing.
At first, the contrast between the realism of our familiar world – where you have to wait ages for buses and make sure you don’t burn your pizza – and a world where magic is real jolted me (Narnia is referenced in passing.) The story develops in complexity, although the main characters are younger teenagers and it’s pitched just a shade younger than Young Adult in that there are romances, but they involve little more than kisses and blushing, and characters become an item off the page, but there is also violence. Zoë reflects on how being more detached (for different reasons and in different ways) from their parents has perhaps made her and the others more likely to find the Door, while Ciren and Charm have their theories about the people they call World Travellers.
Apart from liking to have someone to show off to and her philosophy of ‘you never know what might be useful’, it’s not really clear why Laura brought Zoë along. Some character names are on the nose – Ciren, Charm and Morgan all having magical abilities, or Alexander being inspired a little by his great namesake (although more by Lawrence of Arabia.)
It ends with the main characters ending up in two groups, with Zoë and Morgan clearly about to learn more about being a World Traveler in the rest of the series. If I came across other books by Lassiter, particularly in this series, I would buy them, but I don’t plant to go looking for them.
I picked this up at a charity shop because the blurb seemed quite interesting (looking back at it, it only gives a taste of what’s in the book, but it was effective.) Three strands are introduced, first of all we’re in a Great Library (I’m reading two other fantasy series about such Libraries.) There we are introduced to mysterious twins, Charm and Ciren, who are given a mission by the much older members of their faction. Next up, we’re back in our world with Zoë Kaul, a soldier’s daughter, at the end of her first term at her latest school in Waybridge, England, still an outsider despite her best efforts. While leaving the school grounds, she overhears an angry encounter between Laura, the kind of girl she’d like to befriend, and Morgan, who is a bit of a Goth and definitely not someone Zoë wants to have anything to do with. Thirdly, we are introduced to the 16-year-old ruler of Shattershard, Kal, worried about the Hajhim, nomads and warriors who have been increasingly attacking the trade to his mountainside citadel, and to one of the Hajhim, Jhezra, a young girl who has become more important among her people, respected by the warriors, because of her connection to the revered Iskander.
All these strands some together quite soon, and my interest in the story kicked up a notch. While I disdained Zoë’s attitude towards popularity, as we follow her home to the base, where her widowed father is away, we see why she wants to fit in. A party gives Zoë a chance to go to Laura’s house, and when Laura and her brother offer to show her something, she agrees. What that is is a Door to the desert just outside Shattershard, where Zoë learns that Alex, Laura and Morgan have been visiting, mixing, getting accepted, although in different ways and with different people, for a while.
There are a lot of moving parts. We’re aware of more than Zoë, privy to the concerns of Kal, such as the demands of the Tetrarchate, the Great Power of this world, and interactions between the twins and Morgan, and others. When, overwhelmed, Zoë returns to our world, having promised not to tell about the Door, there’s a lot for her to process, and the draw of a whole other world is impossible to resist. But when she returns, things have moved on, with what Alex and Laura perhaps thought of as a game having unintended ramifications. New alliances are forged, with two girls willing to protect their boyfriends, and Zoë realising the truth of her father’s advice about her having to make her own choices.
I found the opening chapter generic, and then I got a bit twitchy about the handling of race (the Hajhim are darker skinned than the people of Shattershard, and all the World Travellers are white). This is somewhat addressed by Zoë’s growing awareness of this issue, as someone who has travelled our world as a ‘military brat’, although the book was published before sensitivity readers were a thing.
At first, the contrast between the realism of our familiar world – where you have to wait ages for buses and make sure you don’t burn your pizza – and a world where magic is real jolted me (Narnia is referenced in passing.) The story develops in complexity, although the main characters are younger teenagers and it’s pitched just a shade younger than Young Adult in that there are romances, but they involve little more than kisses and blushing, and characters become an item off the page, but there is also violence. Zoë reflects on how being more detached (for different reasons and in different ways) from their parents has perhaps made her and the others more likely to find the Door, while Ciren and Charm have their theories about the people they call World Travellers.
Apart from liking to have someone to show off to and her philosophy of ‘you never know what might be useful’, it’s not really clear why Laura brought Zoë along. Some character names are on the nose – Ciren, Charm and Morgan all having magical abilities, or Alexander being inspired a little by his great namesake (although more by Lawrence of Arabia.)
It ends with the main characters ending up in two groups, with Zoë and Morgan clearly about to learn more about being a World Traveler in the rest of the series. If I came across other books by Lassiter, particularly in this series, I would buy them, but I don’t plant to go looking for them.
