Honey Girl

A Novel

Paperback, 352 pages

Published Feb. 23, 2021 by Park Row.

ISBN:
978-0-7783-1102-7
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4 stars (3 reviews)

A refreshingly timely and relatable debut novel about a young woman whose life plans fall apart when she meets her wife.

With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.

This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her father’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.

In New York, she’s able to ignore all the annoying questions about …

4 editions

Review of 'Honey Girl' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

Ooof.  Grace is a very relatable POV FMC with very relatable anxiety, and that's even before taking into account all the model minority BS she's trying to navigate.  If you can't identify with the burnout that comes from having to sustain peak performance for years, you're probably not going to like this story.

My only complaints:

  • The relationship with the friends at the beginning is a little hard to parse, and I admit those friends got on my nerves more often than not.
  • Some of the late-story character choices may have made sense for the characters, but took me out of the story for a bit.


Some people may bounce off the more poetic, image-painting prose, but I really enjoyed it.

Rep: biracial Black FMC with anxiety disorder; Japanese-American FMC; side character with borderline.

Sex: <spoiler>Few soft-R-rated sex scenes.</spoiler>

Tags: #AccidentalMarriage #BIPOC #FamilyIssues #FoundFamily #Gayborhood #InversionOfControl #SinglePOV #StructureMeetsWhimsy #Therapy #ThirdPersonPOV …

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5 stars