THE WORST PERFECT MOMENT

A teenage girl wakes up in the afterlife to find it has taken the form of her "best" memory - except that what the afterlife thinks is her best memory is actually her worst. The Good Place meets A Christmas Carol in this moving, often delightfully funny, YA novel.

Tegan Masters is dead. And she's standing in the parking lot of the Marybelle Motor Lodge, the most depressing motel in all of Wildwood, New Jersey. She doesn't know what to hate more: being dead, or being dragged back to the scene of the worst weekend of her life. In the motel's front office, she meets Zelda - a teenaged angel who's as sarcastic as she is annoyingly cute. Tegan is, according to Zelda, officially in heaven. Every person inhabits a replica of the moment of purest happiness from their life on Earth, their own personal heaven. For all eternity. And for Tegan, that eternity is the Marybelle Motor Lodge. Tegan has a few complaints about this. Namely that the weekend she spent holed up in the Marybelle with her dad and her little sister was, for many reasons, pure emotional torture. Zelda insists there's no way she got it wrong - the system is based on an in-depth mathematical analysis - but Tegan refuses to accept the Marybelle is a happy place, let alone the happiest. So she asks to speak to The Manager. The Manager sees merit in her complaint and gives Zelda one month to convince Tegan that the Marybelle memory really does include her moment of greatest happiness. But the stakes are higher than anticipated; Zelda and Tegan will both be assessed during the month-long challenge. If Zelda's calculations prove correct, then Tegan faces a long, long trip to purgatory. But if Zelda did make an error, the angel will be obliterated. With the clock officially ticking, Zelda sweeps Tegan away on a whirlwind tour of her memories, challenging Tegan to piece together the truth of her past - her fears, desires, anxieties - to uncover why the weekend at the Marybelle was more than meets the eye. But Tegan also learns there's much more to Zelda than her snarky shell. And soon she desperately wants to be convinced she was wrong about the Marybelle memory, so she can save the angel she's falling for - and avoid centuries of identity-erasing bootcamp in purgatory. But how can she possibly see that weekend - the weekend her mother abandoned her family and her father had a breakdown - as the happiest memory of her life? How can she prove that to the heavenly powers that be? And most importantly... how can she prove it to herself? Shivaun Plozza is an award-winning author of books for children and young adults. Her YA novels include Frankie, a CBCA Notable Book and winner of the Davitt Awards and a commendation from the Victorian Premier's Literary Award; Tin Heart, recipient of two starred reviews, and The Worst Perfect Moment, forthcoming from Holiday House in 2024. She is also the author of several middle-grade novels, including The Boy, the Wolf, and the Stars and A Reluctant Witch's Guide to Magic, published by Clarion Books, and Meet Me at the Moon Tree, published by University of Queensland Press. She is a frequent contributor to anthologies, and her short work has also appeared in Above Water, Vivid, and The Victorian Writer. She lives in Melbourne.