Ramona Leroux, known to everyone as Ramona Blue, is the compelling protagonist of Julie Murphy‘s 2017 young adult novel Ramona Blue. The story follows Ramona’s journey as she navigates her senior year of high school in the small coastal town of Eulogy, Mississippi, where economic hardship and the lingering scars of Hurricane Katrina shape daily life.
For years, Ramona has confidently identified as a lesbian, that is, until her childhood friend Freddie returns to town, awakening unexpected romantic feelings that challenge her understanding of her sexuality. This transformation becomes the heart of the novel as Ramona experiences the complexities of attraction, questioning whether identity can be fluid while remaining authentic.
Beneath her sarcastic exterior — a defense mechanism honed by years of being “the poor blue-haired lesbian” in a conservative town — lies a deeply compassionate young woman. Ramona’s resilience borders on heroics: she manages her father’s addiction relapses, supports her pregnant sister Hattie through an unplanned pregnancy, and shoulders household responsibilities far beyond her years. Her humor, often sharp enough to draw blood, masks a vulnerability she reveals only in private moments, particularly as she wrestles with her growing feelings for Freddie.
The hurricane that devastated Eulogy when Ramona was a child becomes a metaphor for her life, a permanent upheaval, followed by a reconstruction that never quite returns things to how they were. Her fractured family dynamic — a well-meaning but struggling father, an absent mother whose rare appearances leave emotional wreckage, and a sister depending on her — forces Ramona into adulthood prematurely. Yet these hardships forge her into an emotionally astute observer of human nature, capable of insights that startle even her teachers.
While the novel never applies to the specific label “bisexual”, Ramona’s experience embodies bi identity with nuance. Her attraction to women remains unwavering even as she develops genuine romantic feelings for Freddie, rejecting the false binary that one attraction must invalidate another and understanding that assuming your truth means making space for contradictions.