Otherworldly

About Otherworldly

Otherworldly is a young adult fantasy novel by F.T. Lukens, published in 2025 by Margaret K. McElderry Books (Simon & Schuster). The novel is set in a world where the supernatural — familiars, magic, creatures from another realm — is simply accepted as part of everyday life. Into this world comes Ellery, a skeptic. Where everyone around them takes the supernatural for granted, Ellery doesn't buy it.

That makes Ellery's encounter with Knox — a familiar from the Other World, a being who exists in a very different relationship to magic and the supernatural — a collision of worldviews as much as a meeting of characters. Knox needs Ellery's help to accomplish something in the human world. Ellery needs something from Knox in return. The deal they strike is supposed to be simple and transactional, but deals made across that kind of divide rarely stay simple.

Skepticism and Belief in a Magical World

One of the pleasures of Lukens's fantasy writing is the care with which the worlds are built. Otherworldly works because the setting is fully realized — a place where the supernatural is normalized, which creates all kinds of interesting complications for a character whose instinct is to disbelieve. Ellery's skepticism is not played as ignorance; it is a perspective that has its own internal logic and its own costs in a world designed to be taken on different terms.

Knox, as a familiar, brings a different kind of perspective. His existence is shaped by the supernatural world, and his alliance with someone from the human side — someone who doesn't entirely believe in what he is — forces both of them to negotiate across that gap with unusual honesty. The relationship that develops between them is one of Lukens's strengths: grounded, layered, and earned through the mechanics of the plot rather than assumed.

Why Otherworldly Has Been Banned

The novel has been banned by the Department of Defense Educational Activity, which operates schools on military installations around the world. The DoDEA's removal of Lukens's work is consistent with the broader pattern affecting all of Lukens's titles: the presence of LGBTQ+ characters and relationships in a book is treated as sufficient grounds for removal, regardless of content level or literary merit.

For students in DoDEA schools — many of whom live in communities far from home, in often isolated circumstances — access to a wide range of stories matters. The removal of books that feature LGBTQ+ characters is a statement about whose experiences are considered appropriate to acknowledge in educational settings. Lukens's work pushes back against that statement with every book published.