New Blue Review in Strange Horizons

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Tori Truslow of the ever-excellent Strange Horizons doesn’t love every word of Blue Magic, but does say this:

Besides Juanita, we get a gay male couple, bisexual Astrid, and transgender Ev. Thanks to the magical explosion, Ev is now able to have a male body—although Dellamonica does not fall back on magic as an excuse to ignore the potential complexities of transitioning as a middle-aged parent. I’m not in a position myself to assess how successful a portrayal he is, but I certainly believed in him and overall found the strong showing of queer characters—and the normalization of their queerness—refreshing.

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About Alyx Dellamonica

After twenty-two years in Vancouver, B.C., I've recently moved to Toronto Ontario, where I make my living writing science fiction and fantasy; I also review books and teach writing online at UCLA. I'm a legally married lesbian, a coffee snob, and I wake up at an appallingly early hour.

3 Responses to New Blue Review in Strange Horizons

  1. S.M. Stirling says:
    July 28, 2012 at 11:44 pm

    Yeah, I thought the bit with Ev was well-handled. In particular, I thought she/he made a very convincing male after the switch — but a male who’s new to a lot of it.

    Doing a p.o.v. character of the other gender is always a bit of a challenge; and of course here there are other complications.

    (I always try to run scenes where I’m using a female character as p.o.v. past a first reader of the appropriate gender, and have caught some potentially embarrassing problems that way. I don’t know what Alyx does, but it works. )

    I liked that while the magic -did- solve some of his problems, it didn’t solve -all- of them.

    If magic in a fantasy can’t do anything really important, it becomes irrelevant; if it can do everything, nothing is interesting.

    This struck a very “realistic”, if you’ll pardon the expression, balance.

  2. Ashley K. says:
    July 30, 2012 at 1:12 pm

    Just read The Cage. Can we say brilliant? I love it I love it I LOVE IT PLEASE write more. Esp, lesbian fiction!

    • Alyx Dellamonica says:
      July 30, 2012 at 1:29 pm

      Ashley,

      Thank you–I’m glad you liked it! Just FYI, the protagonist of my novel INDIGO SPRINGS is bisexual, and there are a number of queer characters in the sequel, BLUE MAGIC.