Juliet Takes a Breath: The Graphic Novel

Overview

This graphic novel, adapted by Gabby Rivera from her own prose debut and illustrated by Celia Moscote, follows Juliet Milagros Palante as she leaves her Bronx home for a summer internship in Portland, Oregon. She has just come out to her family, and the uncertainty of her mother's reaction hangs over the trip before it even begins.

Juliet's plan is to spend the summer under the guidance of Harlowe Brisbane, a feminist author whose book gave her language for her own emerging identity. She hopes proximity to her idol will help her sort out what it means to be a queer Puerto Rican woman navigating a family, a faith, and a hometown that don't always have room for that answer.

The mentorship does not unfold as neatly as Juliet imagines. Harlowe is white, unfamiliar with the Bronx, and no more certain of the answers than Juliet is. The story follows what happens when an idealized guide turns out to be an ordinary, flawed person, and Juliet is left to keep building her own sense of self anyway.

A Visual Return to a Modern Coming-of-Age Story

Rivera's original novel found an audience among readers hungry for a coming-of-age narrative that treated queerness, race, and family as inseparable threads rather than competing subplots. This adaptation reworks that material for a visual medium, pairing Rivera's voice with Moscote's artwork to bring Juliet's cross-country journey and interior life onto the page in a new form.

The book sits within a wave of graphic novel adaptations that have brought prose favorites to new, often younger, readers, and it joins a growing shelf of queer coming-of-age comics aimed at teens. Much of its resonance comes from its refusal to offer easy resolution: Juliet's mentor disappoints her, her family relationship stays unsettled, and her sense of identity is presented as something built rather than found. That open-endedness, more than any single event in the plot, is what critics and readers have pointed to as the book's most distinguishing quality.

Why Juliet Takes a Breath Has Been Challenged

Objections to this title center on its frank treatment of sexuality and identity. Juliet's coming out and her exploration of a lesbian relationship are recurring points of concern for challengers who view the content as too mature or too explicit for a young adult graphic format, where visual depiction can read as more direct than prose description. The book's engagement with gender and feminist theory, including passages addressing bodies and sexuality drawn from Harlowe's writing, has also drawn scrutiny.

Its handling of race and identity politics is a second point of contention, as some challengers object to the book's candid discussion of whiteness, privilege, and the friction between Juliet and her well-meaning but limited mentor. Language use, including profanity, is cited as well. Taken together, these objections reflect a broader pattern seen with LGBTQ+ coming-of-age titles, where stories centering queer identity and race draw disproportionate scrutiny in school and library settings. This title has been the subject of 3 state-level and 4 district-level challenges tracked in this catalog.