Ophelia After All by Racquel Marie
Rating: 
Nothing is perfect, and as such, the reviews in this blog are chaotic. My main aim is to share my thoughts, joy and opinions on a book, not make a publication perfect review. This blog endorses authenticity, showing up and joy over perfection.
For the life of me I have no clue how I ended up with this book, but when I was doing my book clearing before the move I decided to get through this one because it didn’t feel too samey like others that had not made the cull.
Ophelia After All follows Ophelia who is known to be a little boy crazy and full of crushes, but also she has a good hand in growing roses, and a bit of a romantic heart.
So she is quite surprised when she is suddenly having the same kind of feelings she has for the many boys in her life, for a quiet and cute girl, Talia. This starts making her doubt herself and her own identity because everyone knows she’s boy-crazy. And as things start getting a bit out of control, including in her friends group partly due to her and to her friends figuring their own doubts out about things, she feels like life is spiralling out of control.
There were a few things I found quite refreshing about the book, which will put us into spoiler territory, so maybe skip this paragraph if it matters to you. One of them was that it isn’t all revolving around Ophelia, her group of friends has their own dramas and doubts and they in part fail her while she is full of doubts, but equally, she isn’t there for them either. And they all notice this slowly, specially as she shut them out while she was doubting herself. The other thing, which is the main spoiler here is that she does not end up with Talia. When she finally decides she wants to figure out things and invite Talia to prom, it turns out Talia wasn’t leading her on, but had a boyfriend and was simply glad to have a friendship with Ophelia. I like that her crush isn’t suddenly a happy ending all magical, but it shows that sometimes we get wrapped up on our own side of the feelings without considering what the other person may be thinking, and that they may not even be sending the “signals” we think are being sent, and are genuinely being friendly. Also, this was a girl to girl kind of oh no, not actually single thing, and Ophelia, well, she has to come to grips with that, and it was nice to see that here.
Overall, the book was fun to read, and it had a refreshing look at identity, figuring things out and romance, and I really enjoyed that.