Gabby Ruiz: Juliet Takes a Breath

I should have read this without having should to have had.  I can't even remember the last book I read for pleasure, without a list or a promise or a book club to drive me to finish it.  But if I was the sort of person who read things he didn't feel he had to (namely, other than cripplingly lazy), this would have been on the list anyway. 

It's a good, if flawed book.  I tried to give it the Literature treatment, highlighting passages that I thought would have thematic significance later, but it simply didn't hold up to that sort of analysis.  Nonetheless, I didn't put it down and read it straight through.  It charmingly weaves a braid of coming of age, queer theory, and racial thinkpiece filled with appealing characters that can be forgiven for seeming overly broad in light of the fact that they are based on real people who, in all likelihood, are actually caricatures of themselves. 

This book wasn't written for me at any angle.  I am neither trying to find where I fit in the world racially, coming to terms with the mechanisms of my own body, nor experiencing the first flutters of love and sexual desire.  There wasn't a single face in the book I could wear, but I still found it revealing.  The title character learns early what I wish I had learned at all: that your identity is never going to be explained to you, and that you must take pieces of what works for you from knowledgeable people you trust, and fill in the gaps with what they could never offer.