I absolutely love Ellen Hopkins. She has become my favorite author. She has such a fascinating way of writing. Like the majority of her books, I definitely give it a 5 star review. I was hardly able to out the book down! ( )

I don't claim to know much about poetry but I don't think this was any good. There were some poems that were kind of clever in their formatting (the first poem every time the character POV changed), but for the majority of these, I don't see why they couldn't have just been written as prose. As it is, the poems felt like poorly-written, stream-of-consciousness style paragraphs that the author then broke into separate lines at arbitrary intervals... Perhaps I am showing my lack of understanding of poetry here, I don't know. I don't understand why Ellen Hopkins' books are so raved about; I don't think this was actually well-written at all.

Anyway, I breezed through the first half of this (it's really easy to read) but felt it really dragged in the second half. There was just so much drama; I felt exhausted reading it all. ( )

Ellen Hopkins is a genius! I LOVED this book. At first I wasn't sure about it, I thought I would say I liked its predecessor (Impulse) better. I was way wrong. Ms. Hopkins delivers a poignant story about four teenagers striving to be perfect. When each character begins to "talk", Ms. Hopkins tells two stories on one page. The skill it takes to do this amazes me.

Cara, Conner's (who we met in Impulse) twin, strives to live up to her parents expectations. She feels she must have perfect grades, get into the perfect school, do all the "right" things in order to gain her parents love/approval. Unlike Conner, she does not buckle under the expectations. She decides to make her own definition of what perfect means. This, of course is easier said than done.

Sean, is a baseball player looking to "score" with Cara and on the baseball field. He is looking to be perfect in order to get a baseball scholarship to college. He is a bit of a jerk and I did not like him very much.

Kendra wants to be the next super model. Who she sees in the mirror and who she really is are two very different people. She is looking outside of herself for approval and feels like she cannot be perfect unless she fits into a size 2 or changes her physical appearance.

Andre is not sure what it is that defines who he is. He is struggling with who he wants to be as opposed to who his parents want him to be. His father puts a lot of pressure on Andre to go to college and Andre is not even sure he wants to go. In the end, Andre knows what he has to do. I loved seeing the progression of each characters' lives and whether or not they choose to keep on with their quest for perfection. I also loved how Ms. Hopkins intertwined the story in Impulse with the story in Perfect.

I think this should be required reading for high schoolers as well as parents of high schoolers. ( )

A story folded up messily into a paper airplane...

Years ago I realized I don't read Hopkin's books to like the characters, I read them to watch awful people burn and suffer. Her books are a series of unfortunete events and awful people mixed with some decent or good people. This one is very much an issue of caring as this book focuses on rich, mostly-white kids getting away with too much and their parents who are focused on reputation and wealth pulling strings and making excuses. There's a lot about the rich to not like, the higher class and the way they raise their kids, but this book nails it in making almost every parent so disgusting and awful that I want them all to burn.

Hopkins delivers a wonderful tale of how parents can ruin kids and pressure can make everyone into monsters. These characters are lacking in my eyes, nothing compared to some of her other books. There are sparks or pieces of more to them, but even the prose they are presented in feels like it lacks her usual spark. It was sluggish to read this book, and by the middle I only kept reading to watch them all burn and it go to hell.

Some of the characters really drag things down, Jenna's motivations are severely flawed, starved for attention yet never happy when she has it. Kendra is over the top and should be dead halfway through the book, seriously, she should be dead not stumbling. It's unlikely by the end that Kendra or Sean will actually be alive, and honestly I couldn't care less about Sean's fate.

Cara soars but also flounders with her awful experiences and lack of peace, Andre is mostly a solid character with his African heritage being shoved down his throat to the point who he dates reflects on if he's being true to it or not(with undertones of if a black man dates a white woman he's betraying his race, wth), and Sean...

Sean is a control freak, a maniac. His sentences are all about how he's planned not only his future but Cara's. How he will destroy her if she leaves, kill men she dates if not disfigure them, and corral her towards the future he wants most. Sean is a disgusting character who gets worse and worse and seems to need Conner's fate more than Conner.

Speaking of Conner, having forgotten Impulse a lot. Conner is the perfect example of a character who is good, and he gets the hell out of this book and stays out.

Really this book is a three star to three-point-five star read. It's not awful but it involves a lot of alcoholism, child grooming, child abuse, rape, date rape, substance abuse, and drugs. A lot of the handling is bad, Sean should be in jail or arrested, and Cara should be getting therapy – a lot of it. Conner deserved better parents, hell, everyone in this book but maybe Andre deserved better parents. ( )

Amazing follow up. I love her books. They're quick reads usually but very detailed. I'm glad she branched out and somewhat finished the stories. ( )