Aelfraeda and the Red City

Aelfraeda and the Red City is made up of 13 closely woven stories, beginning when Aelfraeda is 16 years old, escaping from the confines of the walled-in Red City. Before she was born, Aelfraeda’s brutal, despotic step-father had seized power, turning the Red City, into a walled-in nightmare. Aelfraeda’s story is a feminist, and ecological version of the hero-journey, delving into the power of difference and diversity. Once she escapes the Red City, Aelfraeda moves among multiple relationships, cultures and languages. She sheds the binary categories that might originally have shaped what she could become. Not solely male or female, but gender-fluid. Not separate from the landscapes she travels through, but integral to them. Those landscapes, themselves, have life and power. The wetlands she travels through, and the forests, are alive with humans/elves/dragons/indigenous people, each profoundly affecting each other. Through her relations with others, and her ability to respond to them, and to listen to them, Aelfraeda learns new languages, and her capacity to listen is what eventually enables the Red City to become an extraordinary place of healing and openness, under her leadership as the elven matriarch.