The Worst Perfect Moment
Shivaun Plozza
Holiday House
Published May 14, 2024
Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads
About The Worst Perfect Moment
Equal parts tender and edgy, this inventive queer romance imagines what it might feel like to come of age in the afterlife.
Tegan Masters is dead.
She’s sixteen and she’s dead and she’s standing in the parking lot of the Marybelle Motor Lodge, the single most depressing motel in all of New Jersey and the place where Tegan spent what she remembers as the worst weekend of her life.
In the front office, she meets Zelda, a cute and sarcastic girl Tegan’s age who is, in fact, an angel (wings and all). According to Zelda, Tegan is officially in heaven, where every person inhabits an exact replica of their happiest memory. For Tegan, Zelda insists, that place is the Marybelle—creepy minigolf course, revolting breakfast buffet, broken TV, and all.
Tegan has a few complaints about this.
As Zelda takes Tegan on a whirlwind tour through Tegan’s past to help her understand what mattered most to her in life, the stakes couldn’t be higher. If Zelda fails to convince Tegan that the Marybelle was the site of Tegan’s perfect moment, both girls face eternal consequences too dire to consider. But if she succeeds…they just might get their happily-ever-afterlife.
Full of humor and heartbreak, The Worst Perfect Moment asks what it means to be truly happy.
My Review
First of all, what a fantastic opening line. I love it. This book starts off with a bang, for sure. I like Tegan, too. She’s sparky, but so wounded and vulnerable underneath, and even when she doesn’t mean to let readers into that, she does. Her character easily kept me reading the book.
Zelda, the angel who designed Tegan’s personal heaven, grew on me a little. She’s very Manic Pixie Dream Girl, which I love seeing in a female-female romance, but isn’t my favorite trope, so I struggled with that. She’s goofy and fun, but determinedly crude, which, again, is not my favorite. Too many “butt-face” comments for me.
The scenes that revisit Tegan’s past and show what actually happened, especially the moments she doesn’t want to remember, hit hard. They showed how complex trauma and grief can be. Each one built up emotionally so that by the time I hit the final flashback, it hit hard. That was so well done.
Readers looking for a new spin on the Manic Pixie trope and who enjoy no-holds-barred humor will probably enjoy this one a lot.
Content Notes
Recommended for Ages 14 up.
Representation
Tegan and a few other girl characters are romantically interested in girls..
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Lots of crude comments. Lots of swearing. A few f-bombs.
Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between two girls.
Spiritual Content
Tegan wakes up in the afterlife, in which heaven is supposed to be living at the site of your best memory forever. Purgatory is for people who die with too much unresolved trauma, and means people watch memories of their lives and have the emotions they experienced painfully scrubbed away. Hell, of course, is eternal torture.
Angels are assigned different jobs. There are guardian angels and angels who design a heaven scenario for someone. Tegan visits a counselor, someone who helps her process her death.
Tegan attended Catholic school for a part of her education. There are some references to sins and Catholic doctrines like purgatory, but very little reference to God or faith practices.
Violent Content
References to a girl on a bike being hit by a car, which killed her.
Tegan remembers arguments between her parents, which seem scary and chaotic to her. She sees her dad lose it and kick a door repeatedly. The story deals with abandonment by a parent.
Drug Content
Tegan’s aunt gets drunk and tells her something cruel.
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