Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers
Honey Girl is the story of Grace, a 29-year-old astronomer who is burned out from a lifetime of working for her career, only to find a world unforgiving to Black women.
After a drunken night in Vegas, she wakes up married to a woman named Yuki, who runs a radio show dedicated to the supernatural and “lonely creatures.”
What follows is a beautifully written story about finding your path in life.
Genres
Contemporary, queer
Description
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.
Review
Grace has already graduated college and feels like her life should be on track, but she’s still without direction. Her father loves her but pressures her for success. She burns herself out and can’t find the time to be there for her friends.
This is a relatable situation for people of all ages. It was nice to see a story showing how even in adulthood people flounder and struggle to be fulfilled. I loved the message that creating a life that makes you happy is more important than having a prestigious career.
Grace’s friendships and romance were highly developed, even though this isn’t a very long book. By my standards she has quite a large friend group, but each one was distinct and memorable.
Her relationship with Yuki felt real. On the night in Vegas she thought of Yuki as a mysterious dream girl, but once they start an actual relationship she realizes she is a flawed human like all of us. They have to put effort into making their relationship work, and you can see how much they care about each other.
The story is important for featuring a Black sapphic main character, a sad rarity. It even has a interracial, all-female polyamorous relationship. It is at once a universal story and a story which shows the unique experiences or underrepresented groups.
It made me feel so many emotions, both joy and sadness. Be sure to buy this book when it comes out.