Red as Blue

Ji Strangeway’s Red as Blue beckons LGBTQ youths and GenXers to beautifully come of age again in this prosey hybrid graphic novel.

15-year-old June Lusparian is an outcast caught between worlds. Half Mexican and half Armenian, June hovers on the border of adulthood, searching the streets of Paradise and the halls of Paradise High for signs of redemption – symptoms of life. She longs to carve open her own space to find a beating heart in a barren world. Only her secret gift for music offers a hint of hope. When she falls for blonde, cool girl Beverly, captain of the Spirit Girls cheer squad, June hopes she may, at last, have found that one true thing.

But as their nascent romance grows, June learns true connection requires more than a bond of pain and the ache of desire. Paradise is more than an idea, more than a town. And forgiveness never falls from heaven of its own accord.

Set in a fictional desert town in 1980s Colorado, RED AS BLUE is a moment of eternal tension on the verge of explosion. With a unique, genre-bending style that is sometimes lyrical, sometimes sharp as a razor’s edge, and always engaging; Ji Strangeway paints word-pictures of the volatile world between worlds in which June struggles to find relevance and worth at Paradise High. But June’s Paradise is on life-support, barely breathing.

Will death be the only answer?