Before we go into the deep interpretation of this book, let’s take a look at the title of the book. The title is “Juliet Takes A Deep Breathe”. On the cover of the book, there is a picture of a woman with mohawk hair that is identified with men's style. This is very interesting because two characteristics (both male and female) are found in the figure there. It makes me think that the title is very closely related to the illustration on the cover. Several possibilities become my focus in interpreting the title and illustration, such as;
1. Juliet needs to take a breath for being a woman (since being a woman is not that good – too many demands and rules come to our life)
2. Juliet (in the book) has asthma and this painful disease gives a limitation to Juliet to explore her identity.
Juliet Takes A Breathe is a book about finding passion, identity, and the process of growing up as a woman. It’s about the reality of learning to control the world in a way that allows you to hold up your humanity. The heart of the character of this book is Juliet, who is fierce and vulnerable at the same time. There is a lot of interesting points that must be highlighted in the story. For example, white privilege and unintentional racism especially within feminist circles still happen.
As we know, in some countries, the number of women's empowerment is still quite low. I hypothesize that it could be caused by the same case in this book. Interestingly, in this story, Juliet is told that she admires Harlowe because she is a very active feminist. However, after being with her for a while, Harlowe turns out to be able to do bad things that hurt Juliet's heart, where Harlowe humiliates Juliet as a useless, low caste and low educated woman. She also says that Juliet's black skin made her inappropriate to express her opinion in the forum.
In this case, it is very natural that many women have not dared enough to show off themselves because even those who claim themselves to be feminists (who should be at the forefront of the women empowerment movement) are still taking actions that can injure the self-esteem of other women. As a human, especially one who considers herself a feminist, it should be inappropriate for Harlowe to publicly humiliate a woman. Moreover, she did it to Juliet, who clearly admires her as a feminist and has a strong desire to learn women empowerment from her.
Juliet builds a lot of relationships during her time in Portland–with a cute librarian, with Harlowe’s primary partner, Maxine, and Maxine’s secondary partner, Zaira. And it’s all a whole lot to take in–the questions about identity, gender, race, and relationship status. The author has done an impressive job of capturing the confusion and tender distress that comes with joining a community of people who are older and more experienced than you.
The author does a great job of illustrating how contemporary feminism fails to be intersectional while offering her perspective on how to begin the arduous task of fixing it. She uses Juliet’s relationship with Harlowe to imply that a great place to start is with clear and transparent communication. As with most coming-of-age stories, there isn’t much in the way of a driving plot–the action is in character development and growth.
Juliet must overcome numerous obstacles over the course of the story. She suffers from asthma, triggered by anxiety and the suffocating moments of life, such as when she is brutally stereotyped by her hero at a public reading at Powell’s bookstore (Harlowe). Juliet must unlearn shame, constraining gender roles, and harmful assumptions about her own and others’ identities; she must ask herself a host of questions about what she has, including how and why certain situations feel limiting or hurtful. In other words, she must learn how to breathe in a world full of constraints, but also of joy.
One of the most appealing and empowering aspects of Juliet’s character is that, in addition to self-doubt about her own identity, she possesses a shimmering self-confidence in her queer, fat, brown body and in her intuition, which she follows no matter how scary it might be. Juliet’s narrative is not linear or simple; she must navigate the messy, complicated waters of feminism and social justice in a white supremacist culture. Juliet learns more about herself and her family members deeper than she has expected; the characters are complicated, and therein lies their authenticity. By the end of the story, Juliet, while not renouncing Raging Flower, has picked up many more books about intersectional feminism, anticolonialism, and identity. ***
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