"Loki's Joke is Penny Blackwell's autobiography. Written in the style of a novel, it shows how she spent the first sixty years of her life fighting to be happy inside the male body she was born with. It follows her journey from rejection of her true identity through to its final acceptance and resolution.
Loki's Joke is much more than just another transgender or sex-change story. Certainly that influence runs throughout, but the story shows how only slowly did the author realise how the identity problem was influencing every decision and every aspect of her life.
Penny, who started life as Paul Blackwell, was born in Croydon, South London, England. The story begins with his upbringing in a string of orphanages and homes for the children who had been orphaned by World War Two. There was the converted army barracks in Reading where corporal punishment was accepted, and the orphanage in Hastings where he met a person who was to influence, in absentia, a good part of his life. (Penny's second book, the novella The Hermit and the Ivory Box, describes this person more fully.)
