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A review by heyleigh05
Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Honey Girl is about Grace Porter, a 29 year-old PhD grad whose life undergoes big changes as she graduates and drunkenly/spontaneously marries Yuki Yamamoto, a stranger she met in Las Vegas. Honey Girl is a story of coming-to-adulthood, and Grace has to navigate life outside of academia and facing adult responsibilities while being newly married to a person she doesn’t know. Grace is confronted with internal and external pressures such as her own mental health, her fathers overbearing expectations, her mothers flighty absence, systemic racism in academia/the professional sphere, and being a wife. Grace has to learn how to deal with all these things, and ultimately she has to find and define herself on her own terms.
Honey Girl is a part of burgeoning millennial fiction subgenre. There are so many coming-age-age and young adulthood, but what happens when they transition into adulthood? Adults don’t magically have their shit together when they enter their twenties and the journey of adulthood is always changing, and Honey Girl depicts that nicely. I definitely found this novel relatable in that regard. Reading about a twenty-something who doesn’t know what they’re doing with their life and doesn’t know what direction they want to go was comforting to me because that’s how I feel at 23. It gives me “20 Something” by SZA vibes. It was comforting that even nearing 30, Grace was still unsure about her path and who she was. It reassured me that I have time and also that adults don’t have everything figured out, so I don’t have to rush my life. Also, finding yourself and deciding the rest of your life does not have to be restricted to your twenties; it can go beyond that. Society makes us feel like our twenties are the make-or-break of our lives but we have a whole life to live beyond that.
A theme throughout the novel was the difference between “being alone” and “loneliness”. Grace is surrounded by a network of close friends, family, and mentors. She has so many people in her corner who support her and want the best for her. So many people love her and cherish her, but we know that being surrounded by people doesn’t mean you can’t be lonely. Grace experiences a loneliness that her friends can fulfill. That loneliness doesn’t ease until Grace meets her fellow “lonely monster”, Yuki. The found family in this novel is very endearing. If you enjoy that trope then I would highly recommend this novel. Grace’s friends unreservedly and unquestioningly uplift her and love her fiercely. Some of Grace’s insecurities also stem from parents. Her father, a military colonel, held her to strict standards and drilled constant achievement and persistence into Grace’s head. Being a drill sergeant instead of the supportive, reaffirming father that Grace needed significantly contributes to Grace’s unhealthy behavior in adulthood and her feeling of loneliness. Grace’s mother was also somewhat unreliable when she was growing up because her mother was always traveling the world. Grace’s feelings of abandonment regarding her mother also exacerbated her loneliness. Grace meets Yuki at the right time because she fills a whole that Grace didn’t realize was there. Grace and Yuki take a chance on each other because they saw something in each other that was familiar and comforting.
The novel’s exploration of mental health was also nice. Grace tends to push and overwork herself due to the pressure her father puts on her to succeed. Grace gets so hyper-focused on being the best and achieving in her field that she forgets who she is and how to take care of herself. This feeling of having to be the best and pushing forward is also exacerbated by the awareness that Black people, and Black women in particular, have to work exponentially harder to get the same opportunities and success that white people are just given. Honey Girl does a job at depicting how racism impacts mental health. Grace is made to feel that she isn’t good enough by potential employers because she is Black (technically she’s mixed but I’ll get into that later) and she’s queer. The constant denials and rejections by white institutions weakens her self-esteem.
I want to get into a couple of things that made me side-eye the book a little. The writing does tend to be repetitive, so we get a lot of the same descriptions. Something that really made me roll my eyes was the constant reference to Grace's “bee honey” hair (I kid you not this phrase is used at least 7 times) and her freckles. Grace is mixed. Her father is Black and her mother is white. If this was only mentioned 1 or 2 times I would have moved on from it, but the more it was mentioned the more it started to come across as “I’m not like other Blacks”, for me. There’s also this insinuation that these traits make her inherently special and I just thought, “seriously?”. I don’t know it felt kind of disingenuous to me. There were also many times throughout the novel where I thought that Grace was doing too much work to impress white people and I was like “girl, please free yourself”. This relates to what I said earlier about how Black people have to work harder in academia, but at some point you have to realize that you have nothing to prove to white people and you shouldn’t break your back trying to impress them. Towards the end of the novel I think Grace started to realize that. Lastly, I had to roll my eyes a little when Grace was explaining to her mom her experience being Black in a predominantly white field. My first thought was that her mom absolutely does not have the range to understand what it’s like being Black in white spaces and the racist micro-aggressions you experience.
To conclude my thoughts I do think that the ending was rather abrupt. I understand what Morgan Rogers was doing when she ended the novel when she did, but I felt it was incomplete. There were other subplot points that I wanted to see resolved more neatly, but that’s a personal preference for me. Morgan Rogers’ writing is very lyrical and has so much imagery. It was nice. You should be prepared that this is not so much a romance novel, but a women’s fiction novel about self-exploration and adulthood. I liked the themes explored in Honey Girl and some aspects of it were reassuringly relatable, however there were other things that sort of made me give it the side eye. I also didn’t really feel deeply invested in the characters. For me it was a pleasant read, but I didn’t have an emotional investment in it. I would still recommend this book though particularly for those hot mess twenty-somethings who don’t know what they’re doing with their lives. This novel is comforting in that aspect and it eases that anxiety a little.
3 stars
https://leighn8.wixsite.com/leighsnovelhour/post/good-luck-on-them-20-somethings-honey-girl-review
Honey Girl is a part of burgeoning millennial fiction subgenre. There are so many coming-age-age and young adulthood, but what happens when they transition into adulthood? Adults don’t magically have their shit together when they enter their twenties and the journey of adulthood is always changing, and Honey Girl depicts that nicely. I definitely found this novel relatable in that regard. Reading about a twenty-something who doesn’t know what they’re doing with their life and doesn’t know what direction they want to go was comforting to me because that’s how I feel at 23. It gives me “20 Something” by SZA vibes. It was comforting that even nearing 30, Grace was still unsure about her path and who she was. It reassured me that I have time and also that adults don’t have everything figured out, so I don’t have to rush my life. Also, finding yourself and deciding the rest of your life does not have to be restricted to your twenties; it can go beyond that. Society makes us feel like our twenties are the make-or-break of our lives but we have a whole life to live beyond that.
A theme throughout the novel was the difference between “being alone” and “loneliness”. Grace is surrounded by a network of close friends, family, and mentors. She has so many people in her corner who support her and want the best for her. So many people love her and cherish her, but we know that being surrounded by people doesn’t mean you can’t be lonely. Grace experiences a loneliness that her friends can fulfill. That loneliness doesn’t ease until Grace meets her fellow “lonely monster”, Yuki. The found family in this novel is very endearing. If you enjoy that trope then I would highly recommend this novel. Grace’s friends unreservedly and unquestioningly uplift her and love her fiercely. Some of Grace’s insecurities also stem from parents. Her father, a military colonel, held her to strict standards and drilled constant achievement and persistence into Grace’s head. Being a drill sergeant instead of the supportive, reaffirming father that Grace needed significantly contributes to Grace’s unhealthy behavior in adulthood and her feeling of loneliness. Grace’s mother was also somewhat unreliable when she was growing up because her mother was always traveling the world. Grace’s feelings of abandonment regarding her mother also exacerbated her loneliness. Grace meets Yuki at the right time because she fills a whole that Grace didn’t realize was there. Grace and Yuki take a chance on each other because they saw something in each other that was familiar and comforting.
The novel’s exploration of mental health was also nice. Grace tends to push and overwork herself due to the pressure her father puts on her to succeed. Grace gets so hyper-focused on being the best and achieving in her field that she forgets who she is and how to take care of herself. This feeling of having to be the best and pushing forward is also exacerbated by the awareness that Black people, and Black women in particular, have to work exponentially harder to get the same opportunities and success that white people are just given. Honey Girl does a job at depicting how racism impacts mental health. Grace is made to feel that she isn’t good enough by potential employers because she is Black (technically she’s mixed but I’ll get into that later) and she’s queer. The constant denials and rejections by white institutions weakens her self-esteem.
I want to get into a couple of things that made me side-eye the book a little. The writing does tend to be repetitive, so we get a lot of the same descriptions. Something that really made me roll my eyes was the constant reference to Grace's “bee honey” hair (I kid you not this phrase is used at least 7 times) and her freckles. Grace is mixed. Her father is Black and her mother is white. If this was only mentioned 1 or 2 times I would have moved on from it, but the more it was mentioned the more it started to come across as “I’m not like other Blacks”, for me. There’s also this insinuation that these traits make her inherently special and I just thought, “seriously?”. I don’t know it felt kind of disingenuous to me. There were also many times throughout the novel where I thought that Grace was doing too much work to impress white people and I was like “girl, please free yourself”. This relates to what I said earlier about how Black people have to work harder in academia, but at some point you have to realize that you have nothing to prove to white people and you shouldn’t break your back trying to impress them. Towards the end of the novel I think Grace started to realize that. Lastly, I had to roll my eyes a little when Grace was explaining to her mom her experience being Black in a predominantly white field. My first thought was that her mom absolutely does not have the range to understand what it’s like being Black in white spaces and the racist micro-aggressions you experience.
To conclude my thoughts I do think that the ending was rather abrupt. I understand what Morgan Rogers was doing when she ended the novel when she did, but I felt it was incomplete. There were other subplot points that I wanted to see resolved more neatly, but that’s a personal preference for me. Morgan Rogers’ writing is very lyrical and has so much imagery. It was nice. You should be prepared that this is not so much a romance novel, but a women’s fiction novel about self-exploration and adulthood. I liked the themes explored in Honey Girl and some aspects of it were reassuringly relatable, however there were other things that sort of made me give it the side eye. I also didn’t really feel deeply invested in the characters. For me it was a pleasant read, but I didn’t have an emotional investment in it. I would still recommend this book though particularly for those hot mess twenty-somethings who don’t know what they’re doing with their lives. This novel is comforting in that aspect and it eases that anxiety a little.
3 stars
https://leighn8.wixsite.com/leighsnovelhour/post/good-luck-on-them-20-somethings-honey-girl-review