Ellen Hopkins' Perfect is a fantastic companion novel to Impulse. While Impulse tackles the world from the viewpoint of three teens who have ended up in a psychiatric hospital, Perfect tackles the world from the view of four teens who are struggling with the kind of behaviors that can eventually lead to a psychiatric hospital.
Cara has parents who demand perfection, and she's been striving for it too. Then she finds herself falling in love with a girl. But her boyfriend seems like the perfect guy.
Sean, Cara's boyfriend, is an all-star baseball player. He gets a little help from the pharmaceutical world.
Kendra is an aspiring model who just wants to be a size two and can demonstrate the control needed to get there.
Andre has fallen in love with Kendra's sister, Jenna. Jenna likes to party a little too much, and also, her father is a racist--a pretty big problem when Andre's black.
Over all, I enjoy the way Hopkins writes. I don't read many novels in verse, but her books always manage to affect me. Perfect was no exception. I enjoyed Impulse more, but Perfect is definitely a good read too. My one major flaw with this book is there is a pretty good chunk of background woman shaming. It's largely directed at Jenna, so it more floats out of the background than dominates the foreground, but it is annoying. Also Hopkins does have the tendency to get a little preach-y. But usually I don't get too irritated because it's topics which I tend to agree with.
I couldn't really choose favorite quotes for this one because a large part of the appeal to Hopkins quotes are her formatting which would have been disastrous to try to recreate out of context.
This is considered a sequel to Impulse, so 56 + 2 = 58 points!
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