Review: RAMONA BLUE by Julie Murphy

FACTS ABOUT THE BOOK

Title: RAMONA BLUE

Author: Julie Murphy

Publisher: Balzer + Bray

Price: 4,05€ (Amazon)

Pages: 432

Genre: Young Adult, Romance, LGBTQ* aspects

Year: 2017

BACK OF THE BOOK / WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

Ramona was only five years old when Hurricane Katrina changed her life forever.

Since then, it’s been Ramona and her family against the world. Standing over six feet tall with unmistakable blue hair, Ramona is sure of three things: she likes girls, she’s fiercely devoted to her family, and she knows she’s destined for something bigger than the trailer she calls home in Eulogy, Mississippi.

But juggling multiple jobs, her flaky mom, and her well-meaning but ineffectual dad forces her to be the adult of the family. Now, with her sister, Hattie, pregnant, responsibility weighs more heavily than ever.

The return of her childhood friend Freddie brings a welcome distraction. Ramona’s friendship with the former competitive swimmer picks up exactly where it left off, and soon he’s talked her into joining him for laps at the pool.

But as Ramona falls in love with swimming, her feelings for Freddie begin to shift too, which is the last thing she expected. With her growing affection for Freddie making her question her sexual identity, Ramona begins to wonder if perhaps she likes girls and guys or if this new attraction is just a fluke.

Either way, Ramona will discover that, for her, life and love are more fluid than they seem.

MY THOUGHTS ON THE BOOK

Before I bought this book I basically knew two things about it: that it had a bisexual main character and that it was rather controversial because she fell in love with a boy. 

Now, obviously, bisexual people can, by definition, be attracted to more than one gender and therefore it should be perfectly acceptable if a bisexual character ends up with a guy. The problem here is just that bisexual stories who make their bisexual character end up with a character of the opposite sex are basically not that different to heterosexual romance books, and therefore such books don't really give a lot of representation to the LGBTQ* community. This is definitely a very controversial issue because bisexual people are a part of the LGBTQ* community and they falling in love with somebody of the opposite sex shouldn't exclude them from the community. But you could argue that bisexual people could relate to all the heterosexual romance stories for opposite sex attraction and that if a book is especially promoted as being bisexual and therefore as being an LGBTQ* book, it should have the bisexual character end up with somebody of the same sex because homosexual attraction is still extremely underrepresented in the media. So this is definitely a thought-provoking subject that I don't have a clear opinion on myself.  

I wasn't sure whether I wanted to read this book because I had a feeling that I would, too, be rather sceptical about it if so many people already had been. But then I saw that its hardcover edition got sold for 4€ on Amazon and Thalia (it still has the same price) and so I just had to buy it. It's just crazy that you can get an English hardcover copy for such a low price while you always have to pay 20€ for them for German hardcover books. 

For a hardcover, this book is really surprisingly light in its weight.

I really enjoyed the beginning of the book. Ramona seemed to be a fascinating character, at least from her appearance with her blue hair, which I found quite cool. The book also started with a female/female love story which is always a great start as far as I'm concerned. ;)

Ramona had such a love for and connection to water with which I could identify a lot and I also really enjoyed that the story was set in summer and near a beach and that Ramona's whole life seemed to be where others would come for holiday. I always enjoy reading a book in summer that also has a summery feeling to it itself.

Unfortunately, after the female/female love story faded out, the book went downhill for me and I couldn't relate to Ramona or anything in the story anymore. And that is quite a problem when you read a book with 400 pages and still have a lot of pages in front of you. 

There's nothing special really happening in the book and it really bored me most of the time, so that whenever I started a new chapter I immediately skipped forward to see how long I would have to read until I could take a break again. (And if there were more than ten pages until the next chapter I was mostly so demotivated by that that I just put the book aside.)

I really wanted to get the book done with and it took me a lot of time to get through it because I really had to force myself to read it and also had to force myself to read on while I was reading it.

Ramona grew more and more away from me and I distanced myself a lot from her because I just couldn't relate to her at all anymore. She sort of condemns all girls after this one girl felt uncomfortable to come out and I really wasn't on Ramona's side there. I felt like she had put way too much pressure on that girl to come out and acted quite harsh towards her.

A huge part of the book is Ramona and her family having to deal with being poor and dealing with Ramona's sister's pregnancy and what they will do once the baby arrives. That living situation felt very far away from my own, which is why I couldn't really connect with her in that aspect either and although it is important to open the eyes to how catastrophes like the Hurricane Katrina can change lives so brutally, the whole book was told in such an extremely slow pace that Ramona's family drama also didn't really interest me too much.

I must say that I wasn't too pleased with Ramona going from identifying as a lesbian to falling in love with her former male best friend and questioning her sexuality because it just felt like the book had always wanted to tell that rather classical straight romance story and just wanted to make its main character that little bit more special and to get attention from the LGBTQ* community and therefore the author put that female/female romance at the beginning of the book. 

To be honest, it just felt like a straight romance story in disguise to me.

But I wouldn't even be upset with the female/male romance if there had been sparkling chemistry between the two characters. I'm always there for chemistry and I definitely don't only enjoy it between two queer people. But there just wasn't any. And as I said in a recent review, a love story is really rather exhausting and boring to read when you don't ship the two characters, when you don't feel it, when you don't really get it. 

I did like Freddie and I thought that Ramona and he had a great friendship but it felt very forced to me to bring them together - just like this classic straight romance trope of the sand box boy and girl ending up together.

The displays of affection between Freddie and Ramona felt so cringy and awkward to read for me and had this wanting-to-look-away effect that any public display of affection between strangers has on most people - and that was mainly because these two characters just did not grow on me and I just had no connection to them. Because whenever I feel chemistry between two characters I'm totally up for lots of detailed displays of affection between them. I just really forced myself to read their story although I lost more and more interest in it with every page I turned.

The book basically gave me problems that I didn't want to have and since the book quickly reached the point where I could just not identify the tiniest bit with Ramona, it confronted me with her problems that I just couldn't care less about. And spending 400 pages in that mood is really upsetting and just not a nice experience at all. Now that I'm writing all of this I wonder why I didn't just stop reading this book instead of forcing me to do so .. but I just have this policy of wanting to finish a book. I also really don't understand why this book had to be 400 pages long because it could have been easily shortened about 200 pages and would have saved me a lot of time thereby. Because nothing big or interesting actually happened over those 400 pages. And when you can't at all relate to the main character it's really not nice to spend so many pages in her head.

When I bought this book I was so excited that I got to buy a popular book for such a cheap price but now that I've read it I'm super glad that I didn't spend more money on it.

I found it really strange that this book gets said to have a bisexual protagonist everywhere when Ramona doesn't ever identify as bisexual herself. So I wouldn't actually say that the book gives any great representation for bisexual people. 

CONCLUSION

I had the worst time reading this book. I so wanted to stop reading it and forced myself through almost every page of it. It was dragging on endlessly and slowed down my reading immensely. I could not at all identify with the main character Ramona and felt no chemistry whatsoever between her and Freddie. I also find it problematic that this book gets promoted to be a bisexual book because Ramona never actually identifies as being bisexual. The first few pages in which she identified only as a lesbian and when there was a female/female love story were the only part of the book that I enjoyed.

I'm glad I didn't pay more than 3€ and something for this book because that book was definitely neither worth my time nor my money.

RATING

I award this book with 1,5 stars out of 5 stars.