AJ is a buttoned-up, responsible student attending a high-achieving high school in Michigan. She lives with her mother, stepfather, and two younger half sisters.
Della spends every summer with her father in Florida. A free-spirited wild child, she spends as much time as possible on the beach with her friends and older siblings.
But there’s a catch: AJ and Della are the same person. Adelaide Beloise Jepsen to be exact, and she does everything she can to keep her school and summer lives separate.
When her middle sister crashes her carefree summer getaway, Adelaide’s plans fall apart. In order to help her sister, save her unexpected friendship with a guy who might just be perfect for her, and discover the truth about her own past, Adelaide will have to reconcile the two sides of herself…and face the fact that it’s perfectly okay not to be perfect all the time.
AJ's parents each have other families; her good natured, hard working father has two children older than her, while her driven, organised mother has two children younger than her. AJ spends summers as the baby of her father's family and the rest of the year managing her younger siblings for her mother. She keeps her lives separate, even using different names with each. But as she grows older, her lives become more complicated, and maybe she doesn't want to spend her life split in half any more.
Sad to say, I didn't enjoy this as much as I hoped I would. It's a slow starter, and for a while the timeline is jumping back and forth until it settles down. I didn't think much of AJ's mother; her other family, all in all, seemed much better and I enjoyed her scenes with them.
It's not an awful read; it has a nice tone and some lovely descriptions, and the overall, 'be who you are and ignore the haters' message was nice. I did think it weird that AJ never mentioned her other friends at the end; only Lex was even as much as mentioned. It seemed clear to me that AJ liked her Florida life better, overall.
This is an interesting read with some good points; it's just not as great as I was expecting, and that's probably my fault, not its.
The Flipside of Perfect publishes on the 6th April, 2021. I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
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