Genre: Queer romance

Synopsis: 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 parent’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 constant 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.

Content/Trigger Warnings: (from author's website) discussion and depictions of mental illness, self-harm (scratching skin, nails digging into skin as anxiety coping mechanism), past suicide attempt by side character, depictions of anti-Blackness and homophobia in the academic and corporate settings, casual alcohol consumption, minor drug use (marijuana), discussions of racism experienced by all characters of color, past limb amputation due to war injury (side character), past parent death (side character)

What a book! I loved Honey Girl in a way I’m not sure I could fully express in words. I felt so many strong emotions as I navigated through Grace’s journey with her. The style of the book and its prose was so beautifully melodic. And even though there are certainly challenges that Grace faces throughout the book, it was also such a calm experience in reading.

But what I think I appreciated most was the journey of not knowing what you’re doing in life - not knowing what you want to do, or if the degree you have worth it, or are the people in your life the people you want in your life? It was such a reaffirming story of exploration and finding a space in the world that’s just for you. A story that allows you to accept that it’s okay to be wherever you are in life.

s an academic advisor and someone that works with college students every single day, I’m often faced with this kind of reflection and introspection. I encourage my students to give themselves some grace and it allows me to do the same for myself. Reading a book like this is personally validating.

But also, I just loved Grace. I thought she was wonderfully written and her character arc was so honest and real. It wasn’t a perfect arc and because of that, it felt so much more special than the usual arc seen in so many other stories.

I will forever cherish this book, and would highly recommend it. It’s literary fiction mixed with coming of age (for the 20-something) mixed with romance, and it’s so pleasant.