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A review by caughtbetweenpages
Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
I really wanted to love this book; I feel like it speaks to a lot of the things that I really loved in my reading last year of women in their quarter life crisis era kind of making poor decisions and everything crashing around them, and to some degree that is true about Grace. However, where I think this book kind of fell flat for me is the one place where a book cannot fall flat for me without it kind of ruining the whole thing and souring in my mouth mostly and that is: within the characterization.
We get a lot of lip service about Grace and her depth of relationships that she has with people such as Xiomara and Agne,s her friends from her hometown, and the depth of her connection with Yuki once the two of them meet, but none of that is really explored on page, nor does it really feel believable. I'm not saying that a woman who is in crisis and having an identity crisis in the way that Grace is having is unrealistic, and that when a woman is in that sort of a position she might be more of an emotional taker than a giver, but at no point did I buy that Grace had any qualities that would make people like her at all. When her friends come to her with problems, she is quite unsympathetic and cannot seem to understand that they might have issues themselves, and the way that the book is written it doesn't seem as though we're meant to consider Grace just, like, an unlikable (and thus interesting) character because of that; we're meant to sort of be taking her side and and believe that she's in the right when she minimizes other people's problems. It's as though she's less a character in her own right and more the on-paper idea of what a super burnt-out, very anxious and depressed, type-a, high achieving Black queer woman would look like.
I think this becomes most clear when you see the conversations that characters have with one another. They feel quite stilted and wooden, as though instead of two people talking, it's an attempt to prove a point. There's a conversation in particular that I'm thinking of of where a friend of Grace's from her hometown comes to visit her while she's staying with Yuki in New York, and while they're out for drinks this friend of Grace's ends up telling her about some struggles that he has with worrying about letting his father down and how much he's had to sacrifice within his own life in order to make sure that his sister and his father are okay and safe after the death of his mother... and out of kind of nowhere this conversation turns into what I think is meant to be an argument? because we're told that they're angry at one another? but really it doesn't read that way at all all. And the conversation, despite these two people being inebriated enough to have a drunken argument on page, are talking incredibly lucidly and woodenly *around* one another. I don't know how to explain this without spoiling it, but it very much felt like "how are you two close enough that he calls you his sister and you don't know each other well enough to understand what the other one is saying and where they're coming from? How do you know each other so little but still have this professed closeness and adoration for one another??" And it'd be fine if it was just one relationship where Grace was just like "oh, okay. Okay, like, I've kind of been a bad friend to this one person and I didn't know him very much at all and that's a thing that we have to overcome," but truly it's every relationship in the book. Everyone that she talks to kind of sounds exactly like that. There is no distinction in terms of character voice.
By far the best part of this book is the sort of last 1/4th or 1/5th of it where Grace is finally reckoning within herself about all of the everything that she's been putting off up until that point and realizing how much by imposing all of these rules upon herself, she has sort of stunted her own ability to grow as a person... and I think that would have felt a lot better and more honest if we felt any of that in the first 3/4ths of the book. Instead that was something that we had to very much infer. I did enjoy that Grace took the time to heal for herself. I enjoy that, you know, she started therapy. I enjoy the fact that she started sort of destigmatizing the idea for herself that she was a person instead of, like, a highly achieving machine. All of that felt very important, but the lead-up to there didn't feel honest, and it truly felt like reading like two different stories, one of which was boring and kind of a slog to get through (like, it kind of put me in a slump), and the rest of which felt like a conclusion to a different story, a conclusion that didn't really work because there was nothing concrete to conclude from.
And I think it's a shame because I think Morgan Rogers is a very gifted writer in terms of the prose that she puts on page. It felt and read very clean lyrical without being purple prosy and I think she has the capacity to write really, really intense and nuanced character relationships. Like Grace's relationship with her father towards the end when they finally sat down and had a real conversation, I was like "oh, there it is! there's that depth, there's the messiness in the confrontation when you guys talk to one another that you were capable of this entire time!" but these are the only two characters that you even pseudo-fleshed out. So it's like "oh, you had so much meat! you had so much meat and you just didn't cook it." And I feel like if you're going to flesh out two characters in a book about sort of the start and the falling in love process and then the disillusionment and disenchantment of figuring out that both of you are people with flaws... if you're going to do that, you've got to make the love interest the [other] person that you flesh out too.
Perhaps I could have put up with all of the rest of the woodenness and the two-dimensionality of the other characters if at the very least Yuki and Grace's relationship was given the page space and the nuance that it deserved. Unfortunately, Yuki did kind of get "not like other girls"-ed out of being a character and into being almost like a prop for Grace's coming to terms with who she is. Yuki kind of got the 500 Days of Summer treatment, which was a damn shame because she could have been very interesting. I did like how unapologetically queer this book was and I did enjoy the at least attempts of found family (not only with Grace but also that Yuki had her own family before Grace came along and how Grace was welcomed into that group as well), I just wish the characters were a little less prop and more people. That instead of standing in for things that I think the author wanted to say, they were allowed to say those things through their actions and connections with one another and let those actions shape the story and the plot moving forward.
We get a lot of lip service about Grace and her depth of relationships that she has with people such as Xiomara and Agne,s her friends from her hometown, and the depth of her connection with Yuki once the two of them meet, but none of that is really explored on page, nor does it really feel believable. I'm not saying that a woman who is in crisis and having an identity crisis in the way that Grace is having is unrealistic, and that when a woman is in that sort of a position she might be more of an emotional taker than a giver, but at no point did I buy that Grace had any qualities that would make people like her at all. When her friends come to her with problems, she is quite unsympathetic and cannot seem to understand that they might have issues themselves, and the way that the book is written it doesn't seem as though we're meant to consider Grace just, like, an unlikable (and thus interesting) character because of that; we're meant to sort of be taking her side and and believe that she's in the right when she minimizes other people's problems. It's as though she's less a character in her own right and more the on-paper idea of what a super burnt-out, very anxious and depressed, type-a, high achieving Black queer woman would look like.
I think this becomes most clear when you see the conversations that characters have with one another. They feel quite stilted and wooden, as though instead of two people talking, it's an attempt to prove a point. There's a conversation in particular that I'm thinking of of where a friend of Grace's from her hometown comes to visit her while she's staying with Yuki in New York, and while they're out for drinks this friend of Grace's ends up telling her about some struggles that he has with worrying about letting his father down and how much he's had to sacrifice within his own life in order to make sure that his sister and his father are okay and safe after the death of his mother... and out of kind of nowhere this conversation turns into what I think is meant to be an argument? because we're told that they're angry at one another? but really it doesn't read that way at all all. And the conversation, despite these two people being inebriated enough to have a drunken argument on page, are talking incredibly lucidly and woodenly *around* one another. I don't know how to explain this without spoiling it, but it very much felt like "how are you two close enough that he calls you his sister and you don't know each other well enough to understand what the other one is saying and where they're coming from? How do you know each other so little but still have this professed closeness and adoration for one another??" And it'd be fine if it was just one relationship where Grace was just like "oh, okay. Okay, like, I've kind of been a bad friend to this one person and I didn't know him very much at all and that's a thing that we have to overcome," but truly it's every relationship in the book. Everyone that she talks to kind of sounds exactly like that. There is no distinction in terms of character voice.
By far the best part of this book is the sort of last 1/4th or 1/5th of it where Grace is finally reckoning within herself about all of the everything that she's been putting off up until that point and realizing how much by imposing all of these rules upon herself, she has sort of stunted her own ability to grow as a person... and I think that would have felt a lot better and more honest if we felt any of that in the first 3/4ths of the book. Instead that was something that we had to very much infer. I did enjoy that Grace took the time to heal for herself. I enjoy that, you know, she started therapy. I enjoy the fact that she started sort of destigmatizing the idea for herself that she was a person instead of, like, a highly achieving machine. All of that felt very important, but the lead-up to there didn't feel honest, and it truly felt like reading like two different stories, one of which was boring and kind of a slog to get through (like, it kind of put me in a slump), and the rest of which felt like a conclusion to a different story, a conclusion that didn't really work because there was nothing concrete to conclude from.
And I think it's a shame because I think Morgan Rogers is a very gifted writer in terms of the prose that she puts on page. It felt and read very clean lyrical without being purple prosy and I think she has the capacity to write really, really intense and nuanced character relationships. Like Grace's relationship with her father towards the end when they finally sat down and had a real conversation, I was like "oh, there it is! there's that depth, there's the messiness in the confrontation when you guys talk to one another that you were capable of this entire time!" but these are the only two characters that you even pseudo-fleshed out. So it's like "oh, you had so much meat! you had so much meat and you just didn't cook it." And I feel like if you're going to flesh out two characters in a book about sort of the start and the falling in love process and then the disillusionment and disenchantment of figuring out that both of you are people with flaws... if you're going to do that, you've got to make the love interest the [other] person that you flesh out too.
Perhaps I could have put up with all of the rest of the woodenness and the two-dimensionality of the other characters if at the very least Yuki and Grace's relationship was given the page space and the nuance that it deserved. Unfortunately, Yuki did kind of get "not like other girls"-ed out of being a character and into being almost like a prop for Grace's coming to terms with who she is. Yuki kind of got the 500 Days of Summer treatment, which was a damn shame because she could have been very interesting. I did like how unapologetically queer this book was and I did enjoy the at least attempts of found family (not only with Grace but also that Yuki had her own family before Grace came along and how Grace was welcomed into that group as well), I just wish the characters were a little less prop and more people. That instead of standing in for things that I think the author wanted to say, they were allowed to say those things through their actions and connections with one another and let those actions shape the story and the plot moving forward.