Review: Morgan Rogers – Honey Girl

Like many of you, Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers was one of my most anticipated releases for 2021, and at the end of December, I suddenly got accepted to review it on Netgalley! I was so excited I dove in right away, and I wanted to share my 5 star review with you today. This book comes out on February 23rd.

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Goodreads Synopsis

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 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.

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Review

It has to mean something that I started off the year with what is bound to become a new favourite.

A few days ago, I was preordering some books and I was thinking about how badly I wanted to read Honey Girl and how much I wished I had it already. Shortly after that, I got approved for it on Netgalley, so naturally, I dove in right away.

This is exactly my kind of book. It’s going to be your kind of book too if you crave new adult about millennials. The thing is, our reality is so different from previous generations, and it’s strange that there’s so little books reflecting that. But this one absolutely does.

I was pulled in because of the romance plotline: Grace gets married in Vegas to someone she doesn’t know, and after that, they start talking on the phone, getting to know each other and actually falling in love. But the romance isn’t the main plotline and I stayed for Grace trying to figure out her life. Because it was so fucking relatable, and I felt her struggle so deeply. Grace and I are the same age, and we’re both in a similar phase in life: you’re done with uni, or you’re almost done, and suddenly The Rest Of Your Life is looming over you, and you have Big Decisions to make, and you feel like you have to have everything figured out. But you don’t, and you feel like you’re failing somehow, and it’s the most stressful thing you’ve ever felt. Full disclosure: this put me into such a spiral that I had to drop out of my master’s because of depression. It felt therapeutic to be able to read about this struggle after I’ve had some time to heal. In Grace’s case, she’s also Black and that adds extra difficulties for her, because academia is very white and she needs to work twice as hard as everyone else and even then her merit keeps being questioned.

To be clear, though, this was not a depressing book to me. I actually found it very uplifting and hopeful overall. The writing was both profound and romantic and really pulled me into the book from the start, and I loved the relationships in the book: the romance, the friends, the found families.

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Are you looking forward to this release?

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