The Worst Perfect Moment

By: Shivaun Plozza
Genre: YF - Children's / Teenage fiction & true stories
Published by: Walker Books Australia
Published: 01 Jan 2025
ISBN: 9781760659455

Description

Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, tender and edgy, this inventive romance asks what it means to be truly happy.

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.

Tegan isn’t particularly happy about this. At all.

In the front office, she meets Zelda, an annoyingly cute teen angel with a snarky sense of humour and an epic set of wings. According to Zelda, Tegan is in heaven, where every person inhabits an exact replica of their happiest memory.

But reconciling with her past, might just lead Tegan, and Zelda, to a happily-ever-afterlife …

Review

When 16-year-old Tegan arrives in heaven she cannot understand how the Marybelle Motor Lodge is supposed to be her happy place. It was an utterly awful place where she spent a few days with her Dad and little sister last summer, while her Dad was having a breakdown because her Mum was leaving them. Her memories of it are awful, awful, awful!

Surely Zelda, the angel who decided that this was Tegan’s happy place, must have got it wrong. Apparently Zelda has got things wrong before, and heaven's upper management have given her a month to convince Tegan that this awful motor lodge is where she should spend her eternal life.

If Zelda got it right, then Tegan will be sent to purgatory for thousands of years to cleanse her and prepare her for heaven. But if Zelda got it wrong then she will be terminated, i.e. disappear forever. So when Tegan starts to fall for Zelda she is caught up in what seems like a lose-lose situation...

This is an often humorous, sometimes heart-wrenching look at what truly makes us happy and searching for those little moments that give us this happiness. It is set in an interesting version of heaven where Tegan plays a role in changing some stuffy rules to make it a better place. I mean heaven should be perfect, shouldn’t it ?

I loved this book, and found it thought-provoking and engrossing reading. It contains some swearing and themes that make it best suited to readers aged 14 to 18.