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Perfect (Hopkins novel)

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4.6/5
Barnes & Noble

Publication date
  
September 13, 2011

Originally published
  
13 September 2011

Preceded by
  
Impulse

Genre
  
Young adult fiction

4.4/5
Goodreads

Language
  
English

Pages
  
640

Author
  
Ellen Hopkins

Page count
  
640

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Publisher
  
Margaret K. McElderry Books

Nominations
  
Goodreads Choice Awards Best Young Adult Fiction

Similar
  
Impulse, Burned, Crank, Tricks, Identical

Perfect is a young adult novel written by American author Ellen Hopkins. Like all of Ellen Hopkin's works, the novel is unusual for its free verse format. Perfect is the sequel to Impulse.

Contents

Plot

From the bookjacket

"Everyone has something, someone, somewhere else that they’d rather be. For four high-school seniors, their goals of perfection are just as different as the paths they take to get there.

Cara’s parents’ unrealistic expectations have already sent her twin brother Conner spiraling toward suicide. For her, perfect means rejecting their ideals to take a chance on a new kind of love. Kendra covets the perfect face and body—no matter what surgeries and drugs she needs to get there. To score his perfect home run—on the field and off—Sean will sacrifice more than he can ever win back. And Andre realizes that to follow his heart and achieve his perfect performance, he’ll be living a life his ancestors would never understand.

Characters

  • Cara Sykes: Cara is the twin of Conner Sykes. She is trying to live up to her parents' expectations while at the same time struggling with her sexuality.
  • Kendra Mathieson: Kendra is the ex-girlfriend of Conner Sykes. She has been in beauty pageants her whole life and plans on being a model. She gets plastic surgery and develops an eating disorder to be "perfect."
  • Sean O'Connell: Sean is Cara's longtime boyfriend. He wants a baseball scholarship to Stanford to be with her. He develops an addiction to steroids to be a great baseball player.
  • Andre Kane III: Andre is an African American boy from an extremely wealthy family. His parents expect him to enter a well paying career, though Andre secretly wants to become a dancer, and takes private lessons in secret.

    • Reception

    Critical reception to Perfect has been positive, with the LA Times saying "Hopkins is painfully adept at channeling perfectionist psychology... It's an ambitious idea, powerfully executed." Publishers Weekly criticized the "overabundance of plot points", but stated that the book "explores enough hot-button issues (rape, teen plastic surgery, cyberharassment, etc.) to intrigue her fans and recruit new ones". Kirkus Reviews wrote that "While not razor-edged like her previous work, Hopkins’ portrait of four 12th-graders who are expected to be perfect will nonetheless keep teens up all night reading."

    References

    Perfect (Hopkins novel) Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA