Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers | Book Review

Sometimes books come to you in the times when you need them the most. When you need a reminder to pause and breathe because you've been running for too long even if it doesn't feel like it.

Sometimes books say all that you have been bottling up, too scared to whisper into the universe because then it would be too real, so the book does it for you.

That's what Honey Girl is for me. It's all the things I wish I could say and wish I could do. It's the book that if someone asked me today, "How are you?" I would give them the book and say, "This is how I am, and that's okay because Grace Porter will also be ok."

Honey Girl is much more than a queer romance novel. Honey Girl is about familial expectations and trauma and uneasy relationships with parents. It about mental illnesses and mental health. It's about found family and friendships. It's about finding love in the strangest places. It's about academia and burnout. It's about being a person of color and having to work twice as hard to been seen, to be heard. It's about working so hard, running so fast to the finish line that once it's crossed we're lost and all that we feel is the hallow burn in the deepest parts of our muscles and just being tired.

And it's about loneliness, the type of loneliness we sometimes feel even when we're not alone.

Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers is about Grace Porter, a brilliant and kind soul who for the past eleven years dedicated her time studying the stars beyond those we can see with a naked eye. She the person with the plan who never deviates from it or makes careless decisions like getting drunk in Las Vegas and marrying a complete stranger. But that is exactly what Porter does. In a bright plastic chapel with an Elvis-eque priest, 28-year-old Porter marries sharp, witty, and equally as lonely Yuki Yamamoto. And when she runs away to New York for the summer with her new wife, Grace realizes that you can't ever run away from your problems and feelings. Eventually, all the darkness bottled up has to come out.

Coming of age doesn't just happen in your teenage years, it can happen in your late twenties too when you're forced to navigate the real world that's just as expansive and beautiful and deadly as the great night sky and depths of the ocean.

Honey Girl is poetic and moving and easily has become one of my favorite books of 2021.

If you would like some more facts about it, here are some of my favorite quotes, characters, and pages.

Author: Morgan Rogers

Genre: Adult Contemporary, Romance, LGBTQ+

Publisher and Page #: Park Row Books, 293 (paperback)

Favorite Character: Raj

Quote: "I think lonely creatures ache for each other because who else can understand but someone who feels the same dark, black abyss?" - Yuki Yamamoto

Rating: 5/5 highly recommend

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First book review on The Blog on The Web done, and now goodbye again!

Selena