Gabby Rivera’s book Juliet Takes a Breath is about the summer of coming out and self-discovery and intellectual risk-taking by a Puerto-Rican-American girl who has just finished her first year of college.

She lands an internship with the author of her feminist bible Raging Flower and travels to Portland to be a research assistant and (unintended prop) for a book talk.

Narrated from the first person in a fast, colloquial, conversational style, the book presents the culture shock of a girl from the Bronx encountering the hippie culture of Portland. One of the most hilarious scenes is her reaction to the white people on her first bus ride. She is amazed at the BO, the arm-pit stains, the dreadlocks, the boobs hanging free, the bushy, unkempt beards, the ratty hodge-podge of clothing. But what really made me laugh was this description: “Beautiful-hippie-stranger girl reached for the yellow tape to indicate her stop and a chia pet of pit hair popped out from under her arm” (65). Rivera writes this honest, unvarnished, tell-it-like-you-see-it prose that just portrays reality without a filter. Her narrator judges and then we see the narrator recognize her act of judging, stop, reflect and reorient. Mid-way through the bus ride, the aroma on the bus becomes “earthy.”

Juliet gets a whirlwind introduction to a culture and terminology and perspective which includes words like polyamory, primaries and secondaries, PGPs, trans, microaggressions (“little bullshit acts of racism” [157]). As she meets various other women in Portland, she becomes aware of the wide range of feminist and lesbian expression or philosophy or life-choices. With this new awareness, she discovers things about her own family.

One opinion this book communicated clearly is the idea of intersectionality and understanding that the experience of one woman is very different from the experience of another woman of a different race, ethnicity, religion, etc. The author of Raging Flower is an older white woman named Harlowe Brisbane who celebrates the power of the female (a new-age Barbara Walker) and while eager to be a white ally oversteps lines she does not see because of her assumption that having a vagina means all women have the same needs and struggles. In other words, white women sit down, shut up, and listen and don’t assume anything.

That is what I will do since Harlowe Brisbane is me — at least for the rest of this blog post.

But after this next paragraph.

I read this YA book thinking it might work as a summer reading and must decide NO. There is too much underage drinking and smoking of the devil’s lettuce. Other than that it would be an eye-opening book for students.

Click here for Gabby Rivera’s website. She also writes comic books.