The Cerulean (The Cerulean Duology, #1)

by Amy Ewing

I realize that there are a lot of issues with this book. I never noticed that it was represented as an LGTB+ book, but it is not. The main character lives in a world of only women, where everyone has three mothers, but our main character is straight. I personally did not mind this, since she was always incredibly curious about the planets, so it does make sense for me that she could be straight. However, I do think it is important that this book is not represented as an LGTB+ book since it just is not. It has LGTB characters, but that is it.
The next issue that I have read about in other reviews, is that this book is racist. I am not quite sure what to think of this. We have this city above the sky, of silver colored skin persons who have blue blood and can do magic, and we have the planet with people that are oppressive and cruel. Three characters in this book are described as having brown colored skin, and these are from the planet. We also know that there are gingers on the planet, thus I assume that there are people of all colors on the planet and not strictly people of color. However, this is never stated. All we know is that there are members that are brown-skinned, and there are people with red hair. I definitely understand where people are coming from when they call this story full of racism, however, I believe that these people in the city above the sky are just mythical people who do not represent any race. None of us have skins of silver. I also believe that the planet has people of all skin colors, but the author could have done a better job representing this, instead of only describing three skin colors, all of them brown.

Despite the issues, I really enjoyed this book. The plot was unique, entertaining, and kept surprising me. There were a lot of plot twists I did not see coming, the characters were interesting, even though they were not explored in depth. We do get to know them, but that is all. They do not really go to major changes during this story. I especially loved the parts of Leela in the city above the sky and cared less about Leo and Sera, but I still really enjoyed it. One downside of this book was that the parts were so exclusively split. First, we only hear about Sera, next, we only hear about Agnes and Leo, next... etc. I think the book would have done better if we had switched more frequently from the planet to the city above the sky and back. It would have read more fluently.