Book Review: Perfect-ish by Jessica Seaborn
A smart, funny and heartfelt anti-romcom by a bright new voice in Australian fiction.
Prue is about to turn thirty and feels like everyone else is living their best life. Her friends are posting online about their amazing relationships, exciting travel plans and newborn babies. Prue, on the other hand, has been dumped by her fiancé, she’s dropped out of uni, and her job counselling lonely people only makes her feel more alone.
With the help of her best friend, Delia, Prue sets three goals to turn her life around before her milestone birthday: ditch the job, move out of her brother’s house, and find love.
But when Delia’s perfect marriage begins to crack, and a secret threatens to shatter their friendship, Prue realises there’s a difference between seeming to have a perfect life and finding your own perfect-ish life. And maybe being far from picture perfect is perfectly okay.
Published by Penguin Books Australia
Released August 2023
My Thoughts:I love the description of this book above by the publisher, an ‘anti-romcom’. It sums up this new wave of contemporary Australian fiction so well and Perfect-ish sits very nicely on the same shelf as books such as Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, No Hard Feelings and Crushing by Genevieve Novak, and a more recent release, One Day We’re All Going to Die by Elise Esther Hearst.
These are all stories about women in their 20s and 30s grappling with life, not romance driven, but driven by a focus on themselves, their careers, and what they want out of life with a heavy dollop of friendship and family on the side. It’s so refreshing and lovely to read about real women dealing with real life, without the entire purpose of the story being about ‘getting a man’. Honestly, it’s about time Australian contemporary fiction moved on from the whole romance is everything focus.
Perfect-ish was delightful. It was funny and realistic, sometimes I got frustrated with Prue, other times I loved her outright. I really appreciate the overall intent of the story, that life doesn’t have to be, and indeed, will rarely be, perfect, but being perfect-ish is a pretty good deal. The novel was structured into months as the chapters and at the preface of each chapter was a series of social media posts, a touch that I found amusing, ironic, and at times, a little too… #relatable, lol.
I read in her author bio that Jessica actually works as a television and film publicist at Stan, a company who are rapidly becoming known for their Australian original productions. Could we please, please have Perfect-ish made into a TV series. Pretty please?
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
