New Blue Review in Strange Horizons

Posted on July 21, 2012 by

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.

Response to New Blue Review in Strange Horizons

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

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

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

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

      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.