Juliet Takes a Breath
Gabby Rivera
Juliet is going to take the summer to find herself. She’s just come out as gay to her parents, she wants to be a writer, and she thinks she’s a feminist. Enter Harlowe Brisbane – the ultimate authority on all things feminism and lesbianism. Surely if Juliet lives with Harlowe some of her empowered feminism will rub off, right?
This has no plot, and yet Juliet manages to get herself into trouble. She makes every bad decision that she possibly can, and forgives far more easily than I wanted her to. In a way that perhaps makes her more relatable, yet somehow things just work out for her in the end. Juliet can somehow do no wrong? Her flow-of-consciousness interspersed with passages of Harlowe’s doctrine didn’t do any favours to the feeling that I was just floating and being told the story, not shown it.
Because I’ve gradually been expanding my own queer and feminist language I understood the pain that Juliet was going through. What I did have a major problem with though was that you basically had to have a vagina to be considered a feminist. Having recently read Trans* Like Me, I felt like this novel undermined non cis-gendered people (cis-gendered means basically the gender you were assigned at birth matches the one that you identify as).
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but one of the few swear words I just 100% can’t stand was the major cuss word of this novel. Every time I hear it I feel a bit dirty, and reading it just made me feel the same. I felt honour-bound to finish this novel though because it had a lesbian protagonist, but I felt uncomfortable the whole time. I don’t even want to type it!
We need more novels with underrepresented lesbian women of colour and maybe this novel is for some people. Maybe it could empower other people. It just wasn’t for me – a white, slim, cis-woman lesbian with a hangup on a particular swearword. I read it the moment it came in the door, but put off reviewing it for over a month. 3 stars.
Penguin Random House | 19th September 2019 | AU$16.99 | paperback
I laughed, I cried, and I suffered with Simone. Her character came leaping out of the pages at me and then I spent the rest of my time absorbed in her life. I couldn’t put the novel down. I couldn’t work out who the ‘baddie’ was either, and I was pleasantly surprised by the ending.
I received this novel in early September, and it shouldn’t have taken me more than a month to review. I found myself almost equally repulsed and enjoying the novel, and equally believing and disbelieving at the girls’ behaviour. There were plenty of twists, and magic going on, so many that to review the book in full would spoil them. That being said…
What I really liked about this novel was that it didn’t end at the predictable point of boy-loves-girl-loves-boy. The plot keeps going, and Frank finds himself still continuing on and considering issues he hadn’t thought about. To me it felt like quite a long novel, although I didn’t have a chance to sit down and read it in a single sitting.
Ugh! I didn’t want them to be in love! What I wouldn’t give right now for a YA friendship novel. It sets up unrealistic expectations for young adults – they’re somehow supposed to have a love that makes them defy their parents and overcome their stage fright. It’s ok to be single, and it’s ok to just have friends.
I am warning you now, this novel is not a comfortable or comforting read. I found myself thinking about it while I should have been working, and worrying about Lilian. I even dreamed about it, that’s how powerful this novel was. I wanted Lilian to succeed, even though I knew that it was very unlikely that she would.
How dumb can one girl be? It’s clearly obvious which side she’s going to pick. Oh boo hoo, your boy toy isn’t from the same place. Oh no! You might war with your parents for forever! Get over it! Choose based on what you see, not what people tell you. She’s all about being strong and kicking people in the balls (literally and figuratively) and then she’s just bowled over by good old Killian because he smells good.
Normally I would be irritated by a novel trying to cram too much importance into a single day. I thought to myself at the beginning of this one that I didn’t have much tolerance for the interspersed chapters from Natasha and Daniel, as well as the other randoms they happen to run into! But it grew on me, and in the end I was satisfied. I kept wanting to know the next coincidence to happen.
Rob is a lovely tortured character determined to be miserable. If only he wasn’t quite so, charming? about it? I’m not quite sure what went wrong, but his character just didn’t sing true for me. Maegan on the other hand I could understand, but ultimately it ended up being more about her sister. And the romance between Rob and Maegan was sort of off I guess. They go from kissing to having her shirt off almost instantly as far as I can tell. No, I’m not ok with that, even in a YA novel. It seems like their family circumstances caused them to skip forward in time and not in a good way.
The *star talk* of Zoe and Sam’s fantasy world together didn’t actually set me on fire (pun intended). I was more interested in their complicated emotions and cute ways of showing they cared. For example, Sam’s mom packs her a lunch in foods that are colour coded and divisible by four (which I personally find a very odd manifestation of OCD – but who am I to judge?). Then they share and make crazy flavour combinations.