Dream On, Ramona Riley is a 2025 romantic comedy novel written by American bi author Ashley Herring Blake. The novel is part of the author’s Clover Lake series of romantic comedies, together with Get Over It, April Evans, originally published in 2026, and the upcoming novel Take a Chance, Sasha Sinclair.
The titular character, Ramona Riley, is a young bi woman from Clover Lake, a small town in New Hampshire, who had to leave university and give up her dream of becoming a costume designer after her father was injured in an accident and no one else could look after her little sister, Olive. Abandoned by her mother and forced to take on too many responsibilities from a young age, Ramona’s good memories are few, and include the day she was thirteen and met a mysterious girl near the local lake. It was the day Ramona allowed herself to have fun for the first time, and the day she finally realised she is bi.
Years passed, and just when life in a sleepy town seemed as boring as it could possibly be, Clover Lake was chosen as the filming location for a queer rom-com. And the girl from Ramona’s teenage memories came back — as the lead actress, Dylan Monroe, who is dealing with media prejudice and trauma from growing up as the daughter of world-famous rock stars struggling with drug addiction.
Dream On, Ramona Riley features two bi leading characters, Ramona Riley and Dylan Monroe, who date each other and end up together. The novel uses the classic romance trope about a celebrity — Dylan Monroe — dating an “ordinary person”, Ramona Riley — but in a queer, bi-centered way. The novel also features supporting bi characters: April Evance, Olive Riley, and Blair Emmanuel.
We learn that Ramona and April are bi in the first chapter, and this revelation feels very natural; it’s just part of the storyline where the characters discuss a queer movie that’s being filmed in their town:
Ramona and April — bisexual and pansexual, respectively — shared a look, though Marion had a point. Plus, in a small town like Clover Lake, where minds could be, admittedly, a wee bit small, a queer movie taking over the streets for the summer was a pretty big deal.
The same can be said about the revelation that Dylan and her colleague Blair Emmanuel are bi. It’s mentioned in the first chapter that is devoted to Dylan, in the context of Dylan’s and Blair’s work relationship and their roles in the supernatural show Spellbound, which had a large queer fandom:
Blair Emmanuel was gorgeous and talented and bisexual just like Dylan, and she had played Cressida, a much-beloved witch hell-bent on Dylan’s own vampiric character’s destruction for six straight seasons of Spellbound.
The novel also explores Ramona’s and Dylan’s early understanding of their identities. When thirteen-year-old Ramona first meets Dylan, her thoughts reflect confusion about her queerness that real bi teenagers often had:
Queer…? She’d heard the word before, of course. She’d heard gay and lesbian, and even bisexual — though she’d had to hunt that one down on the internet.
For both Dylan and Ramona, bisexuality plays an important role in their lives as part of their experiences, and they often think about it. This reflects the importance of bi identity for the author, as Ashley Herring Blake struggled to accept her bisexuality because she was raised in a religious family.
“It was important to me to have a main bisexual character in every book,” she explained in her interview with PopSugar.
One of the strongest qualities of this novel is its very diverse cast of bi characters. Dylan Monroe is a tough celebrity. She’s famous around the globe but struggling with personal relationships because of her childhood trauma. Ramona Riley is a family-oriented, kind waitress with ambitions. Olive Riley is a sweet teenage girl who was abandoned by her mother as a baby and was raised by her bi sister. April Evance is a loud and proud pansexual tattoo artist, obsessed with horoscopes, and in many ways a pillar of her local queer community. All four women are bi, and they are all very different as people.
Ashley Herring Blake explained to PopSugar that the diversity of bi characters is very important to her as a bi author:
I think that the way that I wanted to showcase those identities was just — even if the three bisexual women do share that identity — the way they present themselves, the way they walk through the world, and the way they experience that identity is very different. We say very often that this group of people, whoever it might be — this race, ethnicity, sexuality — is not a monolith. We all have varying experiences that we bring to it. We have different ways we’ve come out. We have different ways we’ve figured it out.
It’s not surprising that the book was promoted by the author on her social media accounts as a bi novel.
However, it’s somewhat surprising that some book reviews describe it as a “lesbian rom-com” or even a “same-sex romance” without naming bisexuality, despite the characters frequently speaking about their bi identities. However, other reviews, such as Romance Reviewed and The Bookish Elf, praised and acknowledged the bi representation in the novel.