The Worst Perfect Moment by Shivaun Plozza

Title: The Worst Perfect Moment

Author: Shivaun Plozza

Genre: Contemporary

Publisher: Walker Books Australia

Published: 1^st January 2025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 368

Price: $19.99

Synopsis: 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 …

An earlier version of this review appeared in Good Reading Magazine in February 2025.

~*~

What would you do if you died, and found out you had to live in a heaven created for you or face purgatory until your soul was cleansed? Well, that’s exactly what Tegan is dealing with. A heaven that angel Zelda has created for her, that replicates Tegan’s happiest memory. Except…not. Tegan is horrified that Zelda thinks a depressing weekend with her father and sister at the Marybelle Motor Lodge in New Jersey. What follows is a hilarious and touching journey through the afterlife, as Zelda tries to prove she is right, and prevent herself from being punished. And for Tegan, she’s determined to prove she is right. Her happy memory is something else…something that she’s not quite sure of.

Poor Tegan – nobody listened to her much in life, and it seems that nobody is listening to her in death. She can’t even go and check in on her family while she fights with Zelda over her happiest memory. How can an upstart, snarky angel know Tegan’s happiest memory better than she does? I really felt for Tegan whilst reading this, and felt her frustration through the page as she grappled with what to do, and the appearance of the school counsellor, Ms Chiu as she worked through her death and what was going on around her.

The bulk of the book is the investigation into what Tegan’s happiest moment really is, and whether or not Zelda got it wrong. The driving question of who is right moves throughout the novel as Zelda and Tegan navigate the afterlife and their new relationship – whatever that is going to be. Because if everything goes wrong, then their fates are so intertwined, the outcome could be devastating. And at sixteen, Tegan was only just coming to terms with life when she died.

As Tegan fights Zelda’s determination that this is her happy place, she learns that to do so, she has to reconcile with a painful past. A past she’s been trying to run from, and Shivaun Plozza captures these emotions wonderfully. After all, Tegan is still a teenager even if she is dead and wondering what impact her death has had on her family. It’s a novel that navigates love, life and death and how people respond to it. Or, how the newly dead might respond to death as they enter the afterlife. Tegan’s story is touching, with the prickly teen and angel bickering the whole time. And it’s a story about memory, as Tegan is pulled through her memories in this queer ghostly love story about acceptance, love and friendship.

Tegan’s memory train shows us that life isn’t perfect and that we need to remember this. Nobody can change things that have happened, and we all need to accept ourselves for who we are, which is a theme in many young adult books. It’s an exceptional book that captures important messages about finding out who we are, where we belong, and who loves us, and the feelings teens have around fitting in can be amplified. Shivaun Plozza captures this wonderfully through Tegan. And playing with the tropes of ghost stories and romance has worked well, creating a unique story that can be enjoyed by many readers.