Blue

Blue follows three roommates as they navigate life and love in their post-college years. Tash Daniels, the former party girl, falls for deejay Aidan. Always attracted to the wrong guy, what happens when the right one comes along? Jason Woo, a lighthearted model on the rise, uses the club scene as his personal playground. While he's adept at helping Tash with her personal life, how does he deal with his own when he meets a man that defies his expectations? Penelope, a reserved and earnest graduate student slips under the radar, but she has a secret no one suspects. As the characters' stories unfold, each is forced to confront their life choices or complacency and choose which version of themselves they want to be. Blue is a novel about identity, friendship, figuring out who we are during the "in-between" phases of life, and the search for people who "get us." The characters in Blue show how our interactions with people often bump up against backstage struggles we know nothing of. Visual art, television and film, appear as signposts throughout the narrative, providing a context for how we each come to build our sense of self in the world. With a tribute to 1980s pop culture, set against the backdrop of contemporary New York, Blue both celebrates and questions the ever-changing cultural landscape against which we live our stories, frame by frame. Although fictional, Blue is grounded in interview research, teaching and personal observations. It can be read entirely for pleasure or used as supplemental reading in a variety of courses in women's/gender studies, sociology, psychology, communication, popular culture, media studies, qualitative inquiry, narrative inquiry or arts-based research. The protagonist, Tash Daniels, originally appeared in the best-selling novel Low-Fat Love (Blue is set several years later). Blue can be read as a stand-alone novel. "Blue is a joyful, inspiring and painfully beautiful novel written by gifted scholar and writer, Patricia Leavy." Norman Denzin, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "I love it. Tash is so familiar and yet unique. I get her discontents and I am rooting for her. I find the novel to be cool, hip, and awesome! It would be fantastic in any number of college courses. Young adults should read this. BRAVO, Patricia Leavy!" Laurel Richardson, Ph.D., The Ohio State University "An engaging piece of public scholarship, Blue provides rich food for thought about the pop culture landscape and how its shapes our own stories. This will be a useful and fun teaching tool." Sut Jhally, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Founder & Executive Director, Media Education Foundation