Racquel Marie’s Ophelia After All follows high school senior Ophelia Rojas, a boy-crazy rose gardener. With prom and the end of high school swiftly approaching, Ophelia is reluctant to let anything else change, least of all her understanding of who she has always thought she is, but when she finds herself crushing on her classmate Talia Sanchez, she begins to grow more and more frustrated with that older conceptualization of herself and wonder what might happen if she opened herself up to more.
I’m such a huge Racquel Marie fan. This may be obvious by the fact that I have now reviewed three out of four of her books on this blog, but she is genuinely one of my favorite YA authors, if not the favorite, and I think her books deserve far more hype than they have gotten. While I do think this was her least strong (which is completely reasonable, seeing as this was her debut), I’m really glad I read it. Like her other books (even the zombie one!), it was so warm and full of love and empathy.
Something I particularly love about this book, as well as her other books, is that the characters are allowed to make mistakes while still being treated by the narrative as an ultimately good person who is deserving of love and happiness. Ophelia is bubbly and loves her friends and her family, but she is also a seventeen-year-old who is undergoing huge changes in her life, and because of that, she sometimes lashes out and makes unwise decisions. Close as her friend group might be, the people within it occasionally keep secrets and don’t treat each other as kindly as they should. Despite that, the book never writes any of them off or lets them get away with their bad behavior. Even the jerk ex-boyfriend warrants a little bit of empathy, even if there’s not much more beyond that.
I do want to emphasize that this is not a romance. This is a contemporary YA exploration of self-discovery and self-love. I knew that going into it, and yet I still found myself surprised not just by that fact, but by how much that journey itself affected me. I can’t go into too much detail because I don’t want to spoil it, but I thought it was the perfect ending for this story. Were I prone to crying at books, I know this one would have gotten me. I was so proud not just of Ophelia but of everyone in this book.
And just as a little side note, while this book is not a Shakespeare retelling, Ophelia does in fact get her name from Hamlet, and there were lots of little references courtesy of her Shakespeare professor mom, which made me, a huge Shakespeare nerd, very, very happy.
I understand that teenagers acting like teenagers can be frustrating for adult readers, but if you enjoy YA, I think that Racquel Marie’s Ophelia After All is a must-read. With all the joy and anxiety of the end of high school, this book takes its characters and their feelings seriously while also reminding readers that there is so much more after this. Everything that happens here matters, but nothing has to be set in stone. It is exactly the sort of book I wish I had when I was in high school, and I cannot recommend it enough for today’s YA readers.
