REVIEW: "Tiny Imperfections" by Alli Frank and Asha Youmans
This is an interesting time for this book to come out, against the backdrop of the pandemic. Schools across the country have been shuttered and parents have been tasked with taking up a job they never asked for: homeschooling their kiddos.
In the days since COVID-19 shutdown pretty much all schools in America, I have seen an outpouring of gratitude to teachers. Parents, sitting at kitchen tables or huddled around desks, seeing firsthand just how infuriatingly impossible it feels to teach children even the most rudimentary of lessons proclaim that, whatever teachers make, it should be doubled.
Tripled.
Quadrupled.
Fuck, anything.
Just get these kiddos out of my house.
While it is horrible that schools have been shut — the pause button on “normal childhood” ostensibly pressed — as someone who has worked in education my entire career, I do find it gratifying that parents finally see what it’s really like.
I’m glad that parents get to see that teaching is so much more than just singing the ABCs and refilling bottles of Elmer's Glue-all and laminating anything that will hold still long enough
But there remains something that parents still can't quite understand. In truth, probably will never understand.
School administration.
When this closure ends, we will still have the bullying and boisterous parents, pushing their way into the principal’s office and insisting that, if their child is made to serve a detention they are going to call the local news. He doesn’t deserve it, after all, all he did was cut off eight large — and unobscurable — chunks of a classmate’s hair during recess.
We will still have the helicopter parents, inflating their child’s skills and demanding that they be given more complicated work. They will persist in their instance, despite the fact that we, as trained educators, can see that their student, while wonderful and special in many ways, is struggling to handle the grade-level appropriate work.
We will still have the parents who leave a message on the principal’s office phone at 9pm on a Friday night demanding an explanation as to why mayonnaise wasn’t offered as a condiment option to accompany the corndogs given at lunch. And this same parent will also invariably take umbrage to the fact that their “very important” call wasn’t returned until 8am Monday morning.
A principal for the last 7 years, I have seen it all. But, it’s what I signed up for. It’s what I planned when, realizing I wouldn’t be good at being a starving artist, I decided education was a path that would provide the financial stability I — and my shopping habit — prioritized.
I can only imagine that for Josie Bordelon, the protagonist of this novel, dealing with these frustration-inducing, albeit inevitable, parts of being a part of school administration is even more bothersome, as working in education was never her goal.
In her youth, she had positioned herself on a very different trajectory, intrepidly leaving behind the comfortable life she shared with her Aunt Viv is San Francisco and coast-hopping all the way to NYC to attend college.
Once there, she was quickly talent-scouted and recruited as a model.
A dream come true, really.
But life can turn on a dime, Josie learns first hand, when she unexpectedly finds herself pregnant.
This complication eventually results in her returning to San Francisco and taking on a very new — though still fulfilling — life working at the private school for which was one of the two poster brown children for the many years she attended.
Though Josie still finds a thrill in her job — she still loves the kids and cherishes the strong community she is instrumental in building — she’s finding herself increasingly disillusioned with her life. This disillusionment is amplified in no small part by her complete lack of love life and her impending empty-nester status — as her daughter, a senior, will soon be off leaving her own mark on the world.
So she must redefine her life.
Reimagine her world without her daughter such an ever-present figure in it.
Realize, once and for all, what she really wants.
And, perhaps most essentially, prepare herself to let loose the daughter whose very existence has defined so many aspects of her life.
Like many of the quests in her life, this is one she never signed up for. But at 39, she’s far too young to be put out to pasture. Fortunately for Josie, this year — while still rife with the minutia of education she has become so competent in managing — will be full of (mostly) wonderful surprises.
I went into this book, as I try to go into most books I read, with no preconceived notions. Having seen the cover and been advised that this new author duo was one to check out, I dove in head first. And, to my delight, I found myself landing in a warm, comfortable, relatable story that spoke to me on so many different levels.
It spoke to the mother in me who fears the prospect of, one day, letting go of my child’s hand and letting him venture into the world alone.
It spoke to the daughter in me who was raised by a single mother and can understand what a woman raising a child alone would have to sacrifice.
It spoke to the educator in me who struggles daily to do the best by the students I serve while navigating the often incapacitating tangles of red-tape that make the job feel even more impossible.
The primary reason I was so easily drawn into the vividly spun world of this novel is that all of the characters resonated with me — from seasoned and stubborn Aunt Viv to Josie, with her facade of certainty that so effectively masks how much she feels like she was flailing her way through life.
As I read, it became more and more clear to me that, while a rom com, this novel was, at its heart, about the strength of these women.
It was about Aunt Viv’s willingness to shoulder burdens that didn’t even truly belong to her.
It was about Josie’s willingness to sacrifice her dreams for her daughter.
It was about Etta’s willingness to stand up for what she truly wanted, despite the objections of those closest to her.
Though, in my opinion, truly a girl-power anthem, Ally Frank and Asha Youmans used sparkling romance and humor peppered throughout to keep the book light and digestible. And what resulted from all of this meticulous layering is a rich story full of characters you can’t help but love that will sneak-attack readers with a hidden message.
Sparkly yet serious, this read demands a spot on your “to be read” list.
It earns 5 out of 5 cocktails.
Romance reads have been hitting the spot during this pandemic, so I’m trying to build my TBR in this genre. What’s your favorite romance novel? Tell me about it in the comments, below.
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