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.