Juliet Takes a Breath

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Juliet goes through a lot, she meets new people, open her mind to a world she didn’t know existed, she finds herself, or at least she begins to understand who she wants to be. And I remembered back to 1996 and coming out to a lesbian friend in Asheville, and how she made me feel small and like I wasn’t a good enough queer because I was just “trying on bi. And of course there is the beautiful art style, that I truly loved and that only added so much love for this graphic novel for me.

It was like a constant blast of equating genitals and gender, a wall of cissexism I kept hitting up against. The truly beautiful and unique thing about this book is the incredible visibility of queer spaces, and especially queer spaces for women of colour. Juliet is wise—Juliet knows you can feel love and be deeply loved all in one beautiful moment and that letting that moment be huge and awesome and everything—that’s putting love into the world.This GN through different happy and sad stories really makes you get to know and love the characters. Juliet must confront and explore how her sexuality, gender and ethnicity intersect and that exploration is something so rarely seen in YA.

Harlowe is racist, transphobic, man-hating and the most stereotypical "feminist" ever - but not actual feminist, the type of feminist most people think of and most people HATE. There are passages upon passages where a character holds forth and spouts what feels like a chapter of a queer theory or feminist theory textbook, verbatim.

I feel the tipping point for me was when Harlowe dismissed Juliet’s requests for advil to alleviate her menstral cramps and badgered her into following her personal methods because she was *clearly* the ~more enlightened feminist~ which means *her view is correct!

This book had a slew of diverse characters, and there was also a lot of lessons in here about sexuality, identity, and the importance of pronounce. Gabby Rivera is a Bronx-born, queer Puerto Rican author on a mission to create the wildest, most fun stories ever. As with most graphic novels it’s very easy to read, but the topics aren’t glossed over and I really appreciated the fine balance and editing this must have taken. The synopsis on the back of the book only scratches the surface of all the things covered in this book. I don't know how different this adaptation is from the original book, so I can't speak for the actual story.I appreciate the ending, and if I hadn't completed this book I would have DNFed it with 1 star, but the ending had a discussion of a couple things I had problems with.

you don't see a lot of novels these days which portray menstruation and masturbation, so kudos to both the author and the artist for that ! It was really wonderful to follow a teen in the process of developing their brand of feminism – from learning new terminology to questioning their values and confronting their biases. A couple of nights sleep may have suffered also, but it was such good fun reading this, that I really didn't mind. During this internship she gets introduced to a super diverse group of queer people and finds a queer space to belong for the first time. She also discovers the racism in Harlow's feminism, forcing her to create her own understanding of feminism as the queer, brown, person she is trying hard to be proud of being.Lesbian 'Growth' and Epistemic Disobedience: Placing Gabby Rivera's Juliet Takes a Breath within Puerto Rican Literature and Queer Theory". I've read some of Rivera's journalism and essays on Autostraddle, which I thought were great, but fiction is a VERY different kind of writing and this entire novel needs a gigantic editorial makeover to transform it into that. He was waiting for me to jump up and beg to be educated, beg for him to explain the world he inhabited. Everything is awash in the same palet of orange, yellow, pink and purple, it never changes according to mood or tone (except when the story moves to Miami for a bit, that gets its own wash of samey colours). I usually don't read the adaptation of books BEFORE reading the original, so this may be less "biased" review since it will be judged just on its merits as a graphic novel.