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
At the age of fifteen, Austin Kang Jr. lives a semi-normal teenage life. His parents, Cecilia and Austin Sr., are still in love, and Austin hopes one day it will be the same for him with a special someone.
He lives in a comfortable mansion on North Sunset Canyon Drive. The house has very good feng shui, and it centers their family and keeps them safe and grounded. His passions in life are playing soccer, listening to grunge music like his father, being a Coaugelus and fighting the Coven, and finding a special boy. He also enjoys saving Ordinaries from monsters. But what he loves most of all is hunting monsters to keep them all safe.
His favorite cousin is Barn Wong, but they are more like brothers. Barn and Austin hope they will both get to train at the Dau Xha, the dojo run by sensei Daumo Maurso. Austin’s mother wishes Austin would take a break from the monsters and be a normal boy and have fun.
Meeting up with Barn turns Austin’s little orbit into a spin. He takes notice of the red-haired boy with freckles who’s with Barn – the most beautiful boy Austin has ever seen. He wants to circle him forever.
Elijah Delomary is sixteen. He yearns to have a normal life, but he’s also an Encantreino. He lives with his mother Belinda and sister Tory, and his mentor is his Aunt Christine. His mother rules his life. She puts so much pressure on him. She has a ten-year plan for him and has all types of activities scheduled, even tap dancing. This hardly leaves any time for Elijah to do what he wants. He’s scared that if he did anything wrong, he would tarnish or destroy the family name and his brand.
He misses his father, Lawrence, and feels like he’s to blame for his father leaving. Even though his Uncle George has stepped up and has supported him, he still has a yearning to connect with his father. His mother’s a Magical and his father’s an Ordinary, and in the beginning the relationship was fine, but the difference caused problems between them.
Elijah was often bullied in school because of his red hair and the status of the Delomary name. He’s friends with Ordinaries April, Kevin, Gina, Tina, Letitia, and his cousins Tyrone and Tyrell. They know his secret that he hunts monsters. He also has a stuffed octopus by the name of Ocho and a retriever named Boxey, his familiar.
When Elijah attends the Summer Camp for Magicals, he meets Aurmiddo. The camp for Magicals is in another dimension, and they speak the Old Language. To attend, you have to travel seven thousand years to the future and across six dimensions.
When Elijah has his first kiss with Aurmiddo, it sends him into a panic. Boys do not kiss boys, especially in Elijah’s circles. It would definitely destroy his family name.
When he finally meets Austin and they have their first kiss, it sends Elijah into a whirlwind of overthinking. Will he be able to handle all the pressures that are put upon him, along with Austin and his newly found sexuality?
Tong’s imagination shines through in Magic Monsters & Me. The world-building is amazing, especially for the time Elijah spends at the summer camp. I really enjoyed the fabulous descriptions of his new world of magic and monsters, and the way Tong blends languages and cultures makes this novel outstanding.
I really liked Austin and Elijah as a young teenage couple dealing with coming out, their sexuality, homophobia, bullying and Old Earth rules. The dysfunction in Elijah’s family, especially when it comes to parents, provides a great contrast to Austin’s loving family. Elijah is under so much stress from the burden of his family name and responsibilities. Austin is a beautiful soul – funny, carefree, understanding, and is the perfect support for Elijah.
I also really loved Delvina – she’s wicked and funny, and becomes an ally for Elijah. She’s also has some very important advice.
I highly recommend Magic, Monsters & Me. It’s the first book I’ve read by Timoteo Tong, and it’s entertaining and fun with a little danger, plenty of action, heartbreak, growing pains and first time love. This is a great start to the series, and I can’t wait to see what Tong has planned next for Elijah and Austin!
The Reviewer
Genre: GENRE
LGBTQ+ Category: IDENTITY
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.
