Ophelia After All, by Racquel Marie, follows Ophelia Rojas, a Cuban-American girl who is known to her family and friends as the girl who loves gardening and gets crushes on every boy she meets. During the spring of her senior year, she begins to struggle with confronting the fact that she has a crush on a girl from her government class, and trying to figure out what exactly that means for the image that she and everybody close to her have always had of who she is. Meanwhile, she and her friends dealing with the same end-of-senior year crises and drama that everybody else is.
This is fundamentally a book about growing up and realizing that you don’t know yourself as well as you’d previously thought.
I love Ophelia as a character, She unapologetically adores gardening and taking care of her roses, even solely wearing flower-related clothing. She’s completely unashamed of her copious number of crushes, though she is sensitive when made fun of for it, particularly with the tendency of those around her to label her as “boy-crazy” while she is trying to figure out her sexuality (unbeknownst to them). She loves her friends and family and is nervous about the future in a way that every high-school senior (including myself) can relate to.
I really appreciated the representation in this book. In addition to Ophelia’s self-discovery and coming to terms with her own sexuality (I don’t believe she ever has a label, though she’s still figuring herself out. I’m guessing from the descriptions she gives of her relationship with attraction, where she says that gender doesn’t matter to her, that she’s probably pansexual, but she could be bi or just identify as queer), there’s also a biromantic asexual character (which the bidemisexual in me loved), two bisexual characters, and an aromantic character. The casual aspec representation is something that’s so rarely done in books, particularly those where it isn’t a main focus, and I throughly appreciated it. Additionally, her entire struggle with trying to figure out her identity is done extremely well; it feels natural and compelling.
I also enjoyed Ophelia’s relationship with her parents. Her mother is white and her father is Cuban, and there’s some discussion of what her parents’ cultures mean to her and how they influence her, though it isn’t a central focus of the book. She’s really close with both of them, which makes it even harder for her when she’s struggling with her sexuality, but feels like she can’t tell them without ruining the image of her that they have. Their family is by no means perfect, but it feels so real and loving and I just adored reading about it.
I have more mixed opinions on Ophelia’s friends. Their friend group dynamic felt very toxic to me; the two boys in it, Sammie and Wesley, are completely obsessed with Lindsay, one of the other girls. The two boys are horrible to each other and act super possessive of Lindsay, while she just strings them along, and it’s just a horrible dynamic to read about. I like the two boy characters separate from that situation; Sammie is Ophelia’s best friend since childhood, having grown up as neighbors. They’re very close, and honestly I shipped them even though I knew that it wasn’t going to happen; they had so much more chemistry than any other couple in the book ever did. Meanwhile, Wesley is the “new boy” to the group (of over a year), and he’s a artist who’s really supportive of Ophelia during the entire book, and I just really loved him. However, both Sammie and Wesley become unbearable during the scenes devoted to the love triangle. Meanwhile, Agatha, Ophelia’s best friend besides Sammie, is a cool character, but we just don’t see much of her; she’s not really involved in any of the book’s main plotlines. Talia was honestly only okay; I never got what Ophelia saw in her.
I appreciate the level of honesty with which the book handles relationships and friend-group dynamics; everything and everybody is messy in a way that feels very real. It’s something that’s very rarely seen in YA books, but which feels so compelling when done right, which Ophelia After All does really well. The discussion of the end of senior year and how that affects all of the characters felt so real to me, especially as somebody who’s approaching the end of high school right now. No character is looking at the approaching change that college will bring to their lives in the same way; they all have their own individual concerns and hopes that fit so well into their personalities as to feel completely natural. Racquel Marie clearly knew these characters inside and out, and the book comes alive because of that.
My central issue with the book is simply that I couldn’t get on board with the conclusion. It feels like it leaves too many of the character arcs and subplots a little too unresolved, which is something that always bothers me, and is central reason that I’m only giving the book four stars.
Overall, I really enjoyed Ophelia After All, and am giving it 4/5 stars. It’s a beautiful coming-of-age story that, rather than focusing on characters discovering their identity, allows for them to not know exactly who they are or who they want to be yet, and in that way feels incredibly true to the age group that it’s depicting. Ophelia is a compelling protagonist, and her journey of discovering her sexuality is depicted in such a wonderful and realistic way. Although I have issues with some of the characters and with the conclusion, I overall thoroughly enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to anybody looking for a coming-of-age story, a well-written book about queer self-discovery, or a book about life transitions and accepting that you can’t be certain what life has in store for you, and that is completely okay.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free eARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.
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