Heaven forbid you just have women who like to fuck and love women.

He was a supportive father figure, bucking the tired trope (which, of course, comes from too much real life, but also is not the entirety of the lesbian experience) of the abusive father who gives his daughter “daddy issues” that she “becomes a lesbian” to deal with. Which, honestly, is refreshing in a story about a lesbian. You can feel her mother’s love for her leaping off the pages, but you also get an immediate sense that this coming out process will not be smooth for either of them.Her father is there, too, but I never got much from him. Her little brother, Lil’ Melvin a dreaming teenager with an affinity for Twix bars, her mother, doting but also distrustful of this “opportunity” her daughter has to fly to Portland, Oregon to work for free for a white lady. We meet her vibrant, loving, if somewhat “traditional” family at that dinner table. Like literally, the actual chapters start with her plan to do it at dinner the night she is to fly across the country to start the internship the preface letter landed her. Not a bad life, but one where she’s on the cusp of coming of age…. The preface spells out Juliet’s life in the Bronx. How’s that for an opener? And it just gets better from there. It amused me to watch men confronted by the word “pussy” in a context outside of their control you know, like in bright pink letters on the cover of some girl’s paperback book. I especially enjoyed whipping it out during impromptu sermons given by sour-faced men on the 2 train. No lie, I started reading it so that I could make people uncomfortable on the subway. I’ve been reading your book Raging Flower: Empowering Your Pussy by Empowering Your Mind. The story starts with a preface, a letter from Juliet to “legendary author” Harlowe Brisbane, the “ultimate authority on feminism, women’s bodies, and other gay-sounding stuff” who is “sure to help figure out this whole ‘Puerto Rican lesbian’ thing.” The first paragraph grabbed me into Juliet’s world with so much force, I almost (happily) got whiplash. Thankfully, the journey began with Juliet taking her queer, delightful, irreverent breath.

In 2020, I had a bit of a reading block and only read a grand total of seven books, so signing up for Cannonball Read this year for a full Cannonball was a big challenge to undertake. After a mix-up at the local bookshop where I ordered it from was cleared up (they handed me the graphic novel and not the hardcover I ordered – and I have nothing against graphic novels, I just wanted to read all of her words first), I went home and devoured the entire book in two and a half days. From the first time I heard author Gabby Rivera’s laugh and her description of her book on Brene Brown’s podcast “Unlocking Us”, I knew I had to read Rivera’s debut novel “Juliet Takes a Breath”.

Juliet takes a breath age appropriate