Just Juliet by Charlotte Reagan - PRIDE MONTH REVIEW🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
Just Juliet reads like every high school AU fanfiction I’ve ever read. That’s not a bad thing at all. For the subject matter, the setting, the characters and their voices, it works perfectly. Just Juliet shows us a high school story from a high school point of view, and Lena’s inner dialogue is written almost as though she’s writing her teenage diary. She’s just the right amount of quirky, goofy, and cute – but still makes her own characterisation very clearly made. Lena has it quite easy compared to a lot of the other characters around her, but she’s such a sweetheart, and smart enough to acknowledge her own privilege, that it actually makes her rather endearing.
The plot was very well-contained to the number of pages it had, though I’ll admit when I saw I had thirty pages left and everything seemed to have already reached a happy ending I got very, very anxious. However, as much as the ending hurts, the epilogue more than makes up for it and shows us that true love sometimes takes a lot of character growth to reach – and isn’t something that we usually just find in high school. The ending did make me feel all warm inside, because it was a happy ending, and it was so lovely to see a lesbian and a bisexual girl have a happy ending to their story. I think Just Juliet would make an amazing candidate for a Hollywood teenage movie; I could easily see it becoming the lesbian Love Simon, if you will. I also really loved that the book was definitively clear about Lena’s bisexuality. She’s not a lesbian. She does not love only women. She’s not straight when she’s with Quin and lesbian when she’s with Juliet. She’s unapologetically bisexual, all the time, and seeing a protagonist embrace that label feels like such a strength.
Charlotte Reagan seems to definitely know her audience and what they want to see out of her books – in Just Juliet, we’re given Juliet and Lena’s story, but bits and pieces of the stories of their families and friends. I understand she released a book entitled Loving Lakyn, about Juliet’s gay cousin and his much darker, much sadder struggle with coming out. I hope that Reagan will continue this pattern and give us stories about the cast of characters she produced – it seems that Lacey, Scott, Georgia, and Matt all had their own stories to tell. I would even love to see her write the story of Juliet’s mother and father’s meeting; the James family had such a solid foundation of love, and I felt the story of how that came to be would be an incredibly beautiful, touching one. I wanted to know more about the James family, about Mrs James, the actress and fashion lover, and Mr James, who I got many relaxed, artist type vibes from. We already know Charlotte Reagan can write a beautiful, tantalising slow-burn romance….I want to see that from so many of her other characters, because after reading Just Juliet, I found myself attached to more than, well, just Juliet.
I felt the novel also handled the topics of homophobia and biphobia extremely well. From the blatant homophobia and biphobia – Scott and Lakyn’s parents, Quinton, the students at Juliet’s school – to the subtler microaggressions, as seen from Lacey, Kiki and Lena’s parents, each instance was treated with the due respect it deserved. Kiki in particular resonated with me, because that is a situation I have encountered in real life; one where someone did not agree with homosexuality, but valued their friendship over their personal beliefs. The only part that truly bugged me was Lacey’s remarks, because while they seem ultimately harmless, and were played off as jokes, they did make me uncomfortable and the lack of consequences she receives for them did annoy me. Lacey, I felt, needed to learn that those things were not okay, but often had it slide because Lena valued her friendship too much. However, it is shown that nothing Lacey said was with true malevolence, so at the end of the day I understood why she never seemed to be pulled up on it.
Just Juliet is a sweet, unashamedly happy story about a dorky bisexual girl falling in love with the ultimate lesbian goth girlfriend. It’s a heartfelt book that tells its story with a kindness one doesn’t often seen given to queer characters, but there isn’t a single queer character here who doesn’t get their well-earned happy ending. I really enjoyed it, and I can’t wait to read the sequel (prequel?) Loving Lakyn, as well as anything Charlotte Reagan may write in future, because I believe she will definitely become a stronger writer with time.
