3 out of 4 stars
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The Transitioners: The Purple Blues by Indigo Cox is the first installment in The Purple Blood Lineage book series. I was intrigued by both the book cover and title of this novel. I was even more riled up to read this book when I learned what inspired the author to write this story. Cox set out to write a young-adult fiction fantasy novel story featuring an Afro-American superheroine because she was saddened that although her daughters were avid readers, they scarcely came across heroines that shared their brown complexion.
Misty, our protagonist, is a beautiful hazel-nut complexioned young lady pursuing a doctorate in Music at Girard, a world renown university for great musician alumni. If she graduates, then she will be the first black person to receive a doctorate in music from the university. The keyword is “if”. It is the 1970’s, so not surprisingly she has a racist professor who is sure to flunk her if he knows that she is black. However, she can also fail by being absent from his class. Fortunately, Misty is not your ordinary girl. She can change her skin color to appear white for a while.
This ability to transition is only one of her superpowers. How and why did she come by these superpowers? There is an interesting response to these questions, but I cannot answer them hereto avoid providing any spoilers. What I can say is that, where there is a superhero, there is usually a supervillain. The main theme in this book is hope in the battle against racial injustice and other hate crimes.
For the most part, I enjoyed reading this novel. It consisted of a brief introduction, twenty-one chapters and chapter 1 from the second book in the series; All of this was composed in less than 200 pages. It was not that the book was super suspenseful, but the writing style flowed so well that I wanted to read on and know the full story. Misty was a likable protagonist, and I think that no matter the reader’s background, s/he should be able to relate to experiencing social injustice of some sort.
Unfortunately, there were a couple of things about this book that I consider demerits. There were so many simple grammatical errors that it seems to me that this book was not professionally edited. They did not hinder me from enjoying the reading experience, but they would have been easily spotted and removed with just one more proofreading. Also, there were several characters that I did not like. This point is rather subjective, so I will not divulge much information on it, but it does influence my rating of the book, so I figured I should mention it.
In conclusion, I rate The Transitioners 3 out of 4 stars. I would have still given it this rating even if the book was free of grammatical errors because of the characters I did not like. However, I cannot give it 2 stars because it inspired me to want to read the series, and I recommend it to fantasy fiction lovers such as myself.
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The Transitioners
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