Book Review: Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

Honey Girl
Morgan Rogers
Release Date: 23rd Feb 2021
★★★★

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 her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.

As much as I loved it, this book is definitely not suitable for everyone. It is accessible but it also deals with much more mature themes and I believe, even calls on for some more personal experience. The writing is beautiful, the plot is deep and meaningful and the audiobook is beautifully narrated. And also the representation is great, with black lesbian protagonist, Japanese- American lesbian love interest, black side characters, Indian side characters. It also has themes of mental health, racial issues and so much more. It's okay to admit that something can be best just because it makes you happy, and not because you had to tear yourself apart to get there. It’s just so different and deeper and broader than the contemporaries I usually read. Still the way Grace talked about loneliness even after having so many support systems touched something in me. Her burnout after working for something and sacrificing everything to reach that status, and then realizing maybe the accomplishment was not what she really wanted, was a really terrifying concept. I really loved Yuki as a character. She’s headstrong, and right at step with Grace. Her own show and take on loneliness is so different from Grace's but still comes down to the same point of not being alone but just lonely. And these two lonely creatures orbiting and trying to build themselves and also become closer together, maybe not being lonely together made a beautiful story. This book does lean more towards coming of age than romance. And the platonic relationship between the characters is one of the best found families I've read in a while. The affection, care, worry these characters have for each other runs so deep. One key moment for me was when Grace turns her phone back after being isolated for so long and realizes that these people are her family and they worry and care. I think it gave the character and the relationships so much more depth. It was a slow read in the beginning but once I found the pace it was super engaging. Honestly this is a really well done book and I wouldn't have believed it is a debut. I would also love to listen to Yuki’s show as a podcast rather than snippets of an audiobook. Thank you to Edelweiss and the publisher, Park Row for providing me with an e-arc for an honest review.

Book Review: Sweet & Bitter Magic by Adrienne Tooley

 

Sweet & Bitter Magic

Adrienne Tooley

Release Date: 9th March 2021

★★★★

Ok I'm going to list a bunch of things about this book here because I’ve been reading on a lot of ao3 and that’s how I'm finding my stories.

• High fantasy
• Sapphic witches
• Kinda enemies to lovers
• Definitely idiots to lovers
• A little smidge of there’s only one bed trope
• It is around 350 pages (around 110,000 words because ao3) but I flew by it, finished it in a single sitting Tasmin the most powerful witch of her generation can’t love, has been cursed to not feel for years now. She may heal someone, help someone but she only takes payment in love. There’s a magical plague sweeping through the queendom and that brings Wren to the witch’s door. Wren is a source but more importantly her father is struck by the plague, the same father she has devoted her entire life to. Wren bargains her store of love to save her father and the two strike a bargain to end the plague.

Never learn to love someone untouchable. 

 

This was a really fun adorable fast read. Ok Tasmin cannot love, can't even feel the good feelings really. So she’s a super interesting character with her morality and mostly indifference. On the other hand wren is on the opposite, full of feeling and life and even overwhelming at times. And that made her a more compelling character to me. Especially when she wants her father to acknowledge what she’s doing. To be appreciated and valued for everything she had done for her father. I think it worked out so much better than a selfless daughter angle. Her this “selfish” step also gave her character more depth. She had solid motivations to go and finally be magical, to harness and learn the magic that she’s been living with her entire life.

I actually really like the situation Wren was in with her father. There was this concept that he was ill (even before the plague) because he was so blanketed with guilt of what happened in the past. But also because Wren was so insanely selflessly doing everything for him and he just left on her to take care of him. And eventually he forgot he was the father in that relationship.

The magic was actually really interesting. Wren as a source can actually see the magic, colorful swirls or soot like black magic. And obviously Tasmin somehow extracting love from her patrons. And even the magical witch world Within was really beautiful.

It was not a heavy book or something with very deep thematic meaning but it was a really enjoyable read. I would definitely pick up  more books by Adrienne Tooley whether it is in this world (which would be really great) or another magical world.

Thank you to Edelweiss and the publisher, Margaret K. McElderry Books for providing me with an e-arc for an honest review.

Book Review: Namesake by Adrienne Young

Namesake

 Adrienne Young

Release Date: 16th March 2021

★★★

Summary:

Trader. Fighter. Survivor.

With the Marigold ship free of her father, Fable and its crew were set to start over. That freedom is short-lived when she becomes a pawn in a notorious thug’s scheme. In order to get to her intended destination she must help him to secure a partnership with Holland, a powerful gem trader who is more than she seems.

As Fable descends deeper into a world of betrayal and deception she learns that her mother was keeping secrets, and those secrets are now putting the people Fable cares about in danger. If Fable is going to save them then she must risk everything, including the boy she loves and the home she has finally found.