Book Blurb:
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.
My Review: 3.5 stars
Honey Girl was a sweet and emotional love story that focuses as much on loving another person as it does on loving yourself. Although Grace is twenty-eight, I often envisioned her and her friends as much younger.
The book put a lot of focus on black women in academia and how hard it is to be accepted as an equal and the difficulty of getting your foot in the door. This was an especially tough struggle especially in the field of astronomy. Grace was a complex character; she came from divorced mix-raced parents, a militaristic father with obscene expectations and was drunkenly married in Vegas to a woman she met just hours before.
As Grace and her friends figure out who the woman is, the personalities of the supporting characters are unleashed. Rogers created an interesting support posse around Grace and uses poetic license in both Grace and her wife, Yuki’s, voice. As much as this story touched me, I definitely felt it read like a YA book rather than an adult novel. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy YA, I just wasn’t expecting it. Everything from mental illness, sexual identity, parental control, choices we make, family and love were explored.
Quotes I liked:
Being angry at his unattainable expectations is so much easier than accepting that the only ones I have to meet are my own.”
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