Twice as Perfect
by Louisa Onomé
High School    Feiwel    416 pp.   g
7/22    978-1-250-82350-2    $18.99
e-book ed.  978-1-250-82351-9    $10.99

While busy, high-achieving seventeen-year-old Nigerian Canadian high-school senior Adanna Nkwachi helps to plan her cousin’s traditional wedding to a Nigerian superstar, she is also dealing with her own feelings for two totally different boys. Additionally, her older brother, Sam, has left home following a fight with their parents, and Ada now feels the weight of their expectations resting solely on her. She begins to question whether law school—their plan for her—is really what she wants. When she and Sam eventually reconnect, Ada’s discovery of his choice to be a poet, against their parents’ wishes, inspires her to contemplate other paths for herself. Deftly drawn, charismatic characters bring a measure of humor to the story and reverently ­convey aspects of Nigerian culture. Themes of cultural appropriation, parental expectations, ­familial relationships, first love, and finding one’s own voice are seamlessly interwoven in a fluid plot that is honest and satisfying.

From the July/August 2022 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.