F.T. Lukens is back with Otherworldly, a brand new YA fantasy. For the last five years, Ellery’s land has been trapped in an unending winter. Their parents, unable to support them and their failing farm, send Ellery to the snowbound city to live with their cousin Charlie and her girlfriend Zada. Ellery gives up school to work as a dishwasher at a diner in a dying city full of empty buildings. Once, Ellery believed in the supernatural like everyone else, but when winter never left, their faith withered away. If the gods were real, wouldn’t they do something?
Knox is a familiar, a creation of the Goddess of Death bound to humans who have traded their soul for a boon. When his human is double-crossed, Knox steals a vial of immortality and runs off into the wintery night. His act of rebellion could get him in a lot of trouble with his queen, but she hasn’t been returning his messages for the last five years, for as long as this strange winter has smothered the region, in fact. Knox wants to stay in the human world and live a little before he returns to the Otherworld and has his memory erased. Ellery wants the winter to end. When the two of them collide in a dangerous attack, a deal is struck. The more Knox shows Ellery of the supernatural world, the more their frustration at being abandoned bubbles to the surface. And the more Ellery shows Knox of the human world, the more Knox wants to share it with Ellery. A sweet romance, a mystery, a whole lotta quirky gods, and one chaotic hockey game make this an adventure these teens will never forget.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that if I’d read Otherworldly when I was a teenager, it would have changed me to my core. It’s not uncommon for a book to leave that kind of mark on me—Pride & Prejudice, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Blanca & Roja, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, to name a few—but this was one I desperately needed all those years ago. Like Ellery, I had a complicated, tumultuous relationship with my family, one built on love but tempered with the feeling that fitting into a certain role was more important than who I really was or what I really wanted. Like Ellery, I was able to leave home and build my own found family of queer weirdos. Like Ellery, I also struggled with poverty and living a life with a future that seemed impossibly far away and a present that was never going to get better. Unlike Ellery, I didn’t have a Knox to help me explore relationships, romance, and attraction in a healthy and consensual way.
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Otherworldy
Neither Ellery nor Knox explicitly state they are ace- and/or arospec, nor do I have any idea what Lukens intended for them, but their relationship is the kind I really needed to see at that age. I’d always believed relationships had to be like what I saw in movies and TV, and while Ellery and Knox both find each other physically attractive, their desire doesn’t have the same intensity I was used to seeing back then. As much as I enjoy romance in books and Romance as a genre, I don’t need it in everything all the time. Young adult fiction, especially fantasy, is practically drowning in romance and Romance, so much so that romantasy is now the latest marketing trend. And, because most YA now features older teens, a lot of these romance plots involve allosexual and alloromantic themes. Otherworldly has a romantic throughline. You might even call it romantasy. Yet there is very little kissing and not even a hint of anything else. Kissing here isn’t a first step or leading up to anything, it just is.
The romance exists mostly as a pull between Knox and Ellery. We get the tension between a grumpy character and their sunshine love interest without much in the way of sexual thoughts. That’s what felt so acespec to me, that there was this attraction there but it wasn’t centered on wanting to sleep with someone but wanting to be around them and get to know them and make them happy. The daydreams and desires were tied to personalities and feelings of connection rather than lust. Again, I don’t know what Lukens intended for these characters in terms of acespec-ness, but as a teenager, I really needed to see relationships built on things other than allosexual and alloromantic attraction, and I know for a fact that there are teens today who need those books just as much. To me, their relationship fits closer to queerplatonic than anything allo. There is romance here. but it just doesn’t happen to be in the typical allo presentation. To be clear, the lack of sex and making out doesn’t make it “clean.” It’s just a different expression of attraction and interest.
Something else that impressed me was how Lukens handled poverty. We don’t get poverty as a plot point much in contemporary YA fantasy, so that alone was meaningful. But they also show the truth of it. We see how Ellery works themself to the bone every day, how they sacrificed their education and personal enjoyments to earn what little money they can, how they sent everything home they could spare to their family and kept nothing for themself. Ellery has no money to do anything fun, which makes their quest of helping Knox experience fun human activities so powerful. It’s Ellery’s chance to be human, too. As someone who was very poor for a long time, those little moments of joy and freedom really can make you feel alive, even if just for a few minutes.
I know that every time I review an F.T. Lukens book I say that it’s their best one yet and how wonderful, charming, and utterly delightful it is. And guess what, I’m saying it again with Otherworldly. There was not a single thing I’d change or that didn’t work for me. Each book is queerer and better than the last. Put simply, I loved this book.
Otherworldy is published by Margaret K. McElderry Books.
