review: Messy Perfect

Title: Messy Perfect
Author: Tanya Boteju
Date: Quill Tree/HarperCollins; April 2025
Main character: Cassie Perera
YA; LGBTQIA+ coming out story

Tanya Boteju is a first-generation Sri Lankan Canadian author who grew up in a Catholic home. She moved to Vancouver to attend the University of British Columbia where she completed Bachelor of Arts degrees in both English and Education. She has been teaching high school English and Creative Writing for almost two decades now. In her writing as well as in real life, Boteju wants young people to know that they can have joy and community in their everyday lives.

Cassie, also a Sri Lankan Canadian, works hard to be seen as perfect and to maintain this front, she chooses to hide parts of herself. In middle school, she betrayed her friend, Ben, who eventually left town to attend ballet school in Toronto.

While he was gone, Cassie focused on things she could control like her grades and her volunteer work at school and church. She hid from everyone, including herself, her lesbian identity. But then, Ben returns, and Cassie wants to make things right with him. Her Catholic high school doesn’t have a Gay Straight Alliance, so, for Ben, she decides to build an underground connection with the public high school’s GSA across the street from the Catholic school that she and Ben attend. She tells everyone she’s an ally because she’s not ready to come out. Consequently, her efforts are messy and they back her into having to make decisions very similar to that one with Ben years ago, leaving her to decide whether to appear perfect or to come clean. It gets messy!

Boteju brings much of her lived experience to this story, so she knows what care to take with characters and situations. Much of the story has to do with Cassie’s Catholic faith and how her school fails to provide space for queer identities. This story could get intense on theology and doctrine, but Boteju doesn’t go there; there’s really nothing specific about Catholic teaching. The storytelling is paced through word choices, chapter lengths, and well-developed scenes that keep the story moving. Cringe moments? For me it was every time I read something that was an “SAT word”.

I expected Cassie to crack because her stress level just continues to rise.

On the short car ride home after the fair, my mom prattles on about “what a disgrace” and “some people’s kids” and “who could do such a thing” and “do you know those students or why they would do such a thing?”

I deny, deny, deny, with head shakes and shrugs and nos. Kendra [Cassie’s sister] is mostly silent in the back seat, which is unusual. But she and I have barely spoken this week after I blew up at her at dinner. She probably just doesn’t want anything to do with me.

I head straight to my room under the guise of needing to do homework. It’s not a complete lie. Midterms are over, but I still have the bio project and the normal heap of items to check off my to-do list.

But when I get to my room, I just crawly under my covers and lie there is a ball. I feel muddy—like an indistinct mass of something dark and wet and earthy, and all I want to do is sleep and forget what I did today for a little while. (ebook Chapter 42)

Oh, Cassie!

Messy Perfect is both a window and a mirror, showing readers how systems take away our individuality and the consequences faced by those who can’t find an out.

With so few books out there with intersectional lesbian identities, this books would be an affirming addition to high school and public library collections.

Additional reviews
Kirkus
SLJ
PW
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

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