Twice as Perfect
by Louisa Onomé
Published July 27, 2022
★★★☆☆
Adanna - or Sophie, as people outside of her family call her - is a 17 year old Nigerian-Canadian with a promising future. She is an overachiever and a people pleaser, trying to fit into a carefully defined box under the expectations of her parents. The same expectations that drove her brother to leave home, leaving them estranged.
However, things change as she finds him again and is launched into the world of free will and possibility. Can she break away from her duties unscathed? Or will she be an outcast too?
Filled with questions about duty to family or forging ones own path, Twice as Perfect is a coming-of-age story that deals with culture and generational divide. There was plenty I could relate to, and for the things I didn't experience it was a chance for me to peer into different cultures and practices.
As the high-achiever who wanted to please everyone, I could fully relate to Ada's need to excel. Anything less than perfect was hard to deal with - not necessarily from my parents' expectations, but from my own self worth being assigned to my successes. Add relationships to the mix, and you have a recipe for an interesting young-adulthood and, let's face it, a complicated adulthood with crippling fear of failure.
I really liked the glance at the Nigerian roots of this book. Over the past few months, I've been absolutely loving West African inspired literature (Blood Scion by Deborah Falaye, The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna, Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko), and returning to the colourful culture of the Yoruba and Igbo peoples was refreshing. I especially found the inclusion of the comfortable slang used with Ada's family as it compares to her use of language with non-Nigerians. Did I understand all of it? No, but it provided another element to the experience.
The story in itself was okay. There were a lot of layers to follow: goals for law school, debate club, cousin's wedding, two love interests, estranged brother. Almost all of these aspects were fleshed out completely, which could lead to a bit of a cumbersome read.
That being said, the author dealt with a lot of topics that impact people of colour and divided families. The debate club focused on discussing and arguing cultural appropriation, which is particularly applicable with some social media drama I've seen floating around. Also, skirting around how to have a relationship with a sibling that your parents don't speak to is a topic we don't see a lot, but is highly applicable to divided families.
This book was written well, but it didn't entirely knock my socks off. It felt like it followed a bit of a formula for YA coming-of-age stories and I just wanted a bit more.
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