A review by kutreen
Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This is a sweet romance, but mostly an exploration of complicated relationships and soul searching. I liked the plot, but the writing itself got really repetitive for me and felt like it never got deeper than just below surface-level. I think the same messages could've been achieved with a book half as long. I also had a lot of trouble empathizing with the main character, whose main faults (according to her) are loneliness, perfectionism, and lack of emotional vulnerability. She has four very close friends and a wife, and she is emotionally vulnerable with all of them from the beginning. It is also strange to me that she is confronting her perfectionism at age 29. She's been working herself to the bone for 11 years, in academia no less. I don't understand how she didn't break down or have these revelations about herself sooner. I was just very confused by her. I don't know if that's a fault of the writing, or if in fact a lot of people see themselves in Grace and I'm just not one of those people. The whole thing about "Porters (aka our family) act like this, and don't do that, etc" really bugged me. Even though Grace realizes it's messed up, I hated reading that phrasing over and over again.
I think Grace's parents both had a lot more work to do on themselves and Grace was too forgiving.
I think that the author was trying to accomplish too much and in the end not much got accomplished. A lot of pretty words are said,
Grace gets a little more emotionally vulnerable and a little less perfectionist.
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