What is it they sat? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas? Well, I can’t stay. Maybe one day you’ll find me Honey Girl. Until then, you can follow the sound of my voice. Are you listening?

Honey Girl

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.

*Warning: There is some cursing in this review. I usually don’t curse in my reviews, but it’s an adult book, so I get to use some adult language. 

This book was just so poetic, from the description of feelings to the metaphors for the unknown (both space and paranormal). Even the one adult scene was poetic. When I picked it up, I didn’t think a book so short could be so deep and cause such profound feelings, but I was captivated by the beautiful writing within pages. 

Honey Girl follows Grace, a 28-year old mixed woman who has just finished her Ph.D. in astronomy and is now at a bit of a loss of what to do with her life. For so long, Grace had her life planned out—what school she would go to, what she was going to study, what job she was going to get—but now she feels aimless. For the first time in her life, she doesn’t have a plan. She has no job lined up, she’s burnt out, and she’s dealing with the aftermath of a drunken wedding in Vegas to a woman she doesn’t know and can’t remember anything about the next morning. 

So, she does the only thing she can think of to deal with the loneliness and existential dread that usually comes with the end of an era of life: fly to New York to meet her wife. Along the way, she not only gets to know the champagne-bubble girl who talks of lonely monsters and smells of sea salt and spell herbs but goes on a journey of self-discovery.

And as the reader, you go on that journey along with her because while at its core this is a story about two women falling in love, it’s about so much more than that. It’s about what it’s really like to be in your late twenties and not know what in the actual fuck you’re doing. It’s about fumbling in the real world after you leave the safe bubble that is higher education. It’s about the friends, family, and loved ones that stick by you and who you stick by as you all try to figure your shit out.  

Honey Girl is raw and atmospheric. It doesn’t shy away from how difficult being a new adult is. It investigates mental illness in such a powerful way that makes it seem… well, not normal, and not “okay,” but like it’s more common than it often feels in the moment. And it explores the feeling of loneliness and captures how important friendship and connection are in times of uncertainty.

I believe that this is one of those books that every person in their twenties should read whether you like the romance genre or not. It’s beautifully written, relatable, and has a diverse cast of characters.