Genre: YA, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Paranormal, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
Publisher | Amazon
About The Book
Sixteen-year-old Elijah Delomary loves the City of Angels. The sunshine, the palm trees, the ocean. He especially enjoys battling the monsters infesting the dark corners of the vast metropolis.
As he starts his junior year at Burbank High School he meets a new friend, Austin who also fights monsters to keep Angelenos safe. As their friendship develops and love blooms, Elijah’s arch nemesis Devlina reappears, threatening to use magic to destroy the world.
Elijah must now juggle pursuing his feelings for Austin, meeting the lofty expectations of his affluent and influential family, and fulfilling his destiny to combat the forces of evil and save his hometown.
Warnings: Bullying, racism, homophobia no HEA cliffhanger
The Review
Elijah Delomary is a typical teenage boy attending Burbank High School.
Well, no. His family is the richest family in the country. His mother, Belinda Delomary, is the CEO.
His family is also Magical, and Elijah is the heir apparent to both the family enterprise and its ancient magical lineage. At sixteen. This may be why the dedication of the book is “to everyone who grew up with the weight of the universe on their shoulders.”
This is not the Los Angeles we know. In this universe the world is called the Shimmering, and beneath its surface is a seething world of darkness and evil known as the Gloom. Aside from managing vast conglomerates all over the world, the Delomary family also defend the Shimmering from the monsters who escape from the Gloom with some regularity and try to destroy Ordinaries (i.e. normal people who don’t know about magic).
Elijah—who is short and has red hair—lives in a vast mansion in Burbank with his mother Belinda, her sister Christine, his uncle-by-marriage George Wong, and their son Barnhard Wong—who is both Elijah’s cousin and his best friend. Elijah, being groomed by his mother for his future role in the company, is relentlessly busy, with hardly a moment to himself.
Then Barn’s cousin from Hong Kong, Austin Kang, appears on the scene, when his family moves to Burbank to take up undercover assignments fighting the Gloom on behalf of the Magical Alliance. Austin is tall to Elijah’s short, jock to Elijah’s nerd. Instantly they find many things in common, despite their differences. Any half-aware reader knows love at first sight when they see it. But, of course, in Timoteo Tong’s universe, things are not so simple.
Tong has given us a world in which mundanity and fantasy intermingle seamlessly—at least to the Magical community. It is a highly bureaucratic magical world, and in its own way not unlike the corporate world Elijah’s mother handles with such ruthless efficiency. The author makes great use of unfamiliar languages, depicting a magical cosmology unlike anything we’ve ever heard of. Once you get used to it, it’s fascinating and, oddly enough, understandable.
The real plot, however, is not really about the monsters who keep trying to kill people; or about the underworld goddess, Devlina, who is unhappy with her marriage to the ruler of the Gloom, and keeps visiting Elijah to cajole and complain. The core story of the book is Elijah’s falling in love with Austin and inability to fully accept the fact that he’s gay and unhappy with his life.
I’ve never read a young adult romance like this. The calculated bizarreness of the setting is narrated with a flat-footed teenage angst that I found weirdly resonant—somehow reminding me of my own teenage years (a very long time ago). There is real anguish here—as Elijah struggles with his sexuality (there is no sex in the book at all) and his profound misery at his driven mother’s inability to show him love. He tries to connect with his absent father, which (to say the least) doesn’t help.
There’s a good deal of off-kilter humor in this book as well, and Austin Kang’s character (who is blessed with loving, supportive parents) is delightful and wise (in a sort of goofy teenage way). The crazy mixture of magic and normal keeps the reader amused and slightly unbalanced.
If I had any complaint at all, it’s the cliffhanger ending, which forced me immediately to start book 2.
4 stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.