Juliet Takes a Breath in Around the World in 80 Books

Oct 22, 2020 Nadine in NY Jones rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, young-adult, coming-of-age

2.5 stars

I have to assume I just wasn't the intended audience, because this book did not resonate with me the way it did for many. I usually don't like coming-of-age stories, and at its heart that's what this is.

This felt very "episodic" with each chapter quite distinct from the others. At first I thought "well that makes sense since Rivera is a comic book writer" but I think she wrote this first, so I'm not sure why it feels so step-step-step. I liked that, it's a style I don't often read.

I 2.5 stars

I have to assume I just wasn't the intended audience, because this book did not resonate with me the way it did for many. I usually don't like coming-of-age stories, and at its heart that's what this is.

This felt very "episodic" with each chapter quite distinct from the others. At first I thought "well that makes sense since Rivera is a comic book writer" but I think she wrote this first, so I'm not sure why it feels so step-step-step. I liked that, it's a style I don't often read.

I got really hung up on a lot of the details, though. Harlowe was just so ridiculous with her "raging flower" and essential oils and narcissism - are there really people like that? successful authors who go around calling people "sweet human" and telling them that their aura smells fresh? Harlowe was a huge part of this story and I hated her and could not understand why others found her so charismatic. And what was the point of Lainie? I never really "felt" Lainie. (Actually, I never really "felt" any of these characters - Juliet told us how she felt, but I never felt how she felt.) That felt so thrown in there. Was that just to give Juliet lesbian cred? or was it a plot device to give Juliet something to think about? I also was annoyed that the only two white women in the story were both so awful. I guess that was the point. And the internship was so unprofessional. Are there internships like that? Rivera says she's writing from her experience, so I guess there are. But, how could Juliet possibly write a paper about that hot mess?

I had a really hard time with Juliet's age, too. She's supposed to be 19, midway through her college experience. But she read more like 15 or 16, and a lot of the people around her treated her like she was 15 or 16, too. There was so much she didn't know, that I feel like a college student in women's studies would know already. But I guess that was just a device to allow Rivera to educate readers, and in that case I imagine it was successful. And why did everyone hand Juliet drinks as if she were well over 21? This was set in 2003, I'm pretty sure the national drinking age had been 21 for quite a while at that point.

I wanted less of the "sweet human" crap and more like this:

She put her hand over mine for a moment. Dinosaur-sized butterflies fluttered in my stomach. She smelled like citrus and leather. I was so into it. The whole scene made me feel like I wasn't myself . I was on the back of a vintage Harley, riding down the middle of a street I didn't know with a beautiful biker librarian.

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