rsehrlich's review against another edition
1.0
Rant review and all the spoilers. TLDR: Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan should be fucking ashamed of themselves.
Mad Honey is the worst book I’ve read in years, and surprisingly this *isn’t* because it has the audacity to have a trans character as so many other negative reviews seem to focus on. There’s so much actually wrong with Mad Honey that I was somehow surprised transphobia was the main reason for poor reviews.
Here’s the thing: Mad Honey has an incredibly misleading blurb and was written with total disregard for both the way the legal system works and the realities of gender-affirming care/surgeries. This is odd, considering JFB is a trans woman and JP is known for legal thrillers. While it is technically also about our pasts and the things we carry with us, Mad Honey is primarily a book about a bunch of godawful narcissists doing horrible things to each other and then absolving themselves of all blame for their mistakes because they’ve had difficult lives.
For some reason, this premise is all centered around a murder trial for a young trans woman. I expected a story about family healing in the wake of something terrible interspersed with bee metaphors based on the description, but no—this is about a poorly written and largely unfounded trial that gets no mention in the blurb but is ongoing for about 400/450 of the pages. Not only that but the transgender identity of the MC is treated as a secret juicy plot twist: a completely inappropriate way to handle an increasingly relevant issue. Yikes.
The prose was absolutely stunning and I wanted to like this the entire time, but I just couldn’t. It gets more and more frustrating as it goes on. Spoiler: there is no justice. The person responsible for Lily’s death is identified, confesses, and walks—after 400 pages of torturing the wrong person for it.
While it’s true that there is all too often no justice in the world, especially when it comes to trans and GNC individuals, nobody walks away from the police station after confessing to manslaughter and perjury. Taking another person’s life is not generally a situation where you can decide you just don’t want to bother going to trial again, and it’s a particularly sour taste when the book tries to convince you that the guilty party tried to get Asher sent to jail for an act she committed…because she loved him?
A better book could have a chance at pulling this off, but this one decidedly could not. I finished this book angry and exhausted and not having learned anything new (except about bees. The beekeeping stuff is phenomenal). Frankly, you can only hammer home the same points about the justice system and trans identity for so long before you need new nails. Mad Honey is trying, but it has nothing new or provocative to say about these issues. It’s just grueling.
Now, I’m normally all for character portraits about a bunch of terrible people and the grim realities of life—I love unhappy endings and I love the complexities of despicable characters. But—and maybe it’s just me—, this book does it very poorly and fails to create sympathy for any of its terrible people. Leaving your son in jail for four months while he’s being targeted by predators and only taking action when he attempts suicide, *when you could very easily have made bail the entire time* (albeit at a personal cost)…it’s way too much.
Watching Olivia consistently fail to put her child above her own trauma was realistic and painful, but it went on far too long and to a terrible extent. I expected the choice to bail Asher out to display Olivia’s flaws as a mother, but I did not expect it to be delayed by four months of gut-wrenching selfishness. The authors fail to establish real reasons outside of Olivia’s past that she would believe her son capable of murder, so it’s completely shocking to watch her abandon him for no real reason: certainly, Asher has angry outbursts and an abusive father in his past, but he’s also a teenage boy and never really demonstrates a propensity for violence—absolutely nothing that should make Olivia question if he killed someone. A teenager punching a hole in a wall while feeling betrayed by someone close to him is hardly evidence for fucking murder. It’s not good, but it’s also not like he’s the first kid to ever put a hole in drywall.
By the halfway mark, this book just feels like trauma porn for the sake of it. The technical skill to write a character who does terrible things and still comes out morally gray was…not there, to say the least. Olivia was, plain and simple, a bad parent for most of this book’s major decisions and yet written to be sympathetic due to her backstory of abuse—abuse that seemed “necessary” for her character to have gone through so she would have reason to doubt her son for the entire book, which is…certainly one way to work domestic violence into your book. Yikes again.
Not to mention the abortion scene that was thrown into Olivia's backstory and then never mentioned again. The scene itself was done tactfully, but it had no place in the story. Again, it came across as unneeded trauma porn rather than a well-thought-out portrayal of serious issues. Less really is more sometimes, especially when you're already hitting on three or four huge topics. Some significant paring down on moments like these would have let the core issues shine much brighter instead of playing Bingo with them—these are all important issues that deserve portrayal in fiction, but possibly not all at once, y’know?
The “police work” in Asher's case was also incredibly frustrating. Conversations that should have been inadmissible in court and/or available as audio recordings were twisted to make Asher seem like he was lying about questions the police never asked him. I get that you want your readers riled up about the justice system, but now all your characters have committed a crime and lied under oath, claiming Asher explicitly stated he had ‘never been in Lily’s bedroom’ and there should, based on everything the story has told us, be proof that this was never said in evidence. You cannot make up fake evidence. The American justice system is horribly, horribly broken, but maybe not to the extent that a prosecutor can directly contradict the record for an entire year-long trial with no consequence and the defense not only doesn't even bother to bring it up, but gaslights Asher for being upset about it. Throw the whole case in the garbage at this point because nobody is taking this shit seriously. (Anyway, if you seriously mean to tell me that the police in America care so much about prosecuting a straight white man for the death of a POC trans woman that they’d go so far as making up evidence…boy would I like some of what you’re smoking. The small town NH setting makes it especially unbelievable. As a local, I don’t understand why people think New England is resoundingly liberal—it’s Conservative/Free State hell where the characters are meant to be from. Seriously, look up ‘the town that went feral’—in the early 2000s, Free Staters overran an NH town close to the fictional location of our main characters with BEARS. Where is this liberal utopia you’ve found?)
The same issues exist with Lily, although she has the benefit of more engaging chapters. Regardless, Lily never receives any sort of criticism from this book for her immense dishonesty towards everyone in her life. Every time we get close, there are some really odd lines excusing her from honesty about everything simply because of her past and the risk of revealing herself as trans. Granted, the consequence seems to be that she’s dead, but this book tried its hardest to paint her as a good person while demonstrating exactly how untrustworthy she is.
Lily lies to Asher and her friends about most major aspects of her life—a suicide attempt, making up the death of her father, her trans identity, why she's moved and where she's lived, etc. Point blank, most of these lies in context are...not great. Being friends or in a relationship with someone for months only to find out they’ve made up a fake past is terrifying. Lily being trans is used as the excuse for not telling Asher exactly how dangerous her father was, and there's an ongoing and infuriating discussion of "do I really have to be honest with people if it could out me?" as if that's a valid justification for putting others in danger and building all your relationships on major lies.
Regardless of how someone has been previously hurt for telling the truth, I would not be able to be in a relationship with someone who not only couldn't tell me the truth but lied repeatedly and extensively about it. This part cannot be reduced to just how difficult and dangerous it can be to come out, because that’s really not what it is, but this is exactly what the book tries to do. Mad Honey cuts Lily a LOT of slack for her behavior under the guise of discussing coming out. Meanwhile, Asher is crucified for needing some time to process that his girlfriend doesn’t trust him and why that may be. Weird, weird take.
And, okay, here's the final gripe: for the amount of detail on gender surgery and transition, especially the ones Lily herself went through, there was a lot of incorrect information. Lily is explicitly stated to have had a type of reassignment surgery that cannot produce a fully self-lubricating vagina. Pages later, they spend an agonizing amount of time in court explaining how vaginoplasty results can be self-lubricating, indistinguishable from AFAB genitals, and that this was the case for Lily—both irrelevant and inaccurate to the type of surgery the character underwent. Daily Double for a ten page lecture and a plot hole in one. Why is nobody cross-examining these witnesses and pointing out the literal lies? I suspect it’s because the authors never bothered to do the research. My best guess is this book was an irresponsible money grab, because it certainly wasn’t crafted from a place of care. Mad Honey is at BEST a severe detriment to LGBT literature filled with blatant mistakes.
The “blatant inaccuracy” shit doesn’t even stop at the LGBT issues. This book failed majorly at capturing New England culture/stereotypes/visuals. Not to mention the WILDLY incorrect definitions of things like premeditation under New Hampshire law that could’ve been fixed with ONE Google search. The authors confusingly claim that in New Hampshire, premeditated murder is defined as “even thinking of killing someone for a second before you do it.” Never in my fucking life have I heard such a ridiculous idea—this would make almost ALL murders premeditated and almost totally eliminate manslaughter if “premeditation” means “thinking of something during the moment you’re doing it” which is essentially impossible not to do BECAUSE THAT IS HOW THOUGHTS WORK.
Considering the amount of plotting and research the authors’ notes would have you believe went into Mad Honey, I was disappointed with the complete lack of realism and effort from every angle. Seriously, did an editor ever even see this slapdash pile of nonsense? Where on Earth are all these positive reviews coming from?
In summary, this book broke me.
EDIT: One month out from finishing Mad Honey, I’m dropping my rating from 2 stars to 1. None of the positives and all of the negatives stuck with me—I can’t justify giving this more than one star no matter how much I enjoyed a few of the sections at the time.
Mad Honey is the worst book I’ve read in years, and surprisingly this *isn’t* because it has the audacity to have a trans character as so many other negative reviews seem to focus on. There’s so much actually wrong with Mad Honey that I was somehow surprised transphobia was the main reason for poor reviews.
Here’s the thing: Mad Honey has an incredibly misleading blurb and was written with total disregard for both the way the legal system works and the realities of gender-affirming care/surgeries. This is odd, considering JFB is a trans woman and JP is known for legal thrillers. While it is technically also about our pasts and the things we carry with us, Mad Honey is primarily a book about a bunch of godawful narcissists doing horrible things to each other and then absolving themselves of all blame for their mistakes because they’ve had difficult lives.
For some reason, this premise is all centered around a murder trial for a young trans woman. I expected a story about family healing in the wake of something terrible interspersed with bee metaphors based on the description, but no—this is about a poorly written and largely unfounded trial that gets no mention in the blurb but is ongoing for about 400/450 of the pages. Not only that but the transgender identity of the MC is treated as a secret juicy plot twist: a completely inappropriate way to handle an increasingly relevant issue. Yikes.
The prose was absolutely stunning and I wanted to like this the entire time, but I just couldn’t. It gets more and more frustrating as it goes on. Spoiler: there is no justice. The person responsible for Lily’s death is identified, confesses, and walks—after 400 pages of torturing the wrong person for it.
While it’s true that there is all too often no justice in the world, especially when it comes to trans and GNC individuals, nobody walks away from the police station after confessing to manslaughter and perjury. Taking another person’s life is not generally a situation where you can decide you just don’t want to bother going to trial again, and it’s a particularly sour taste when the book tries to convince you that the guilty party tried to get Asher sent to jail for an act she committed…because she loved him?
A better book could have a chance at pulling this off, but this one decidedly could not. I finished this book angry and exhausted and not having learned anything new (except about bees. The beekeeping stuff is phenomenal). Frankly, you can only hammer home the same points about the justice system and trans identity for so long before you need new nails. Mad Honey is trying, but it has nothing new or provocative to say about these issues. It’s just grueling.
Now, I’m normally all for character portraits about a bunch of terrible people and the grim realities of life—I love unhappy endings and I love the complexities of despicable characters. But—and maybe it’s just me—, this book does it very poorly and fails to create sympathy for any of its terrible people. Leaving your son in jail for four months while he’s being targeted by predators and only taking action when he attempts suicide, *when you could very easily have made bail the entire time* (albeit at a personal cost)…it’s way too much.
Watching Olivia consistently fail to put her child above her own trauma was realistic and painful, but it went on far too long and to a terrible extent. I expected the choice to bail Asher out to display Olivia’s flaws as a mother, but I did not expect it to be delayed by four months of gut-wrenching selfishness. The authors fail to establish real reasons outside of Olivia’s past that she would believe her son capable of murder, so it’s completely shocking to watch her abandon him for no real reason: certainly, Asher has angry outbursts and an abusive father in his past, but he’s also a teenage boy and never really demonstrates a propensity for violence—absolutely nothing that should make Olivia question if he killed someone. A teenager punching a hole in a wall while feeling betrayed by someone close to him is hardly evidence for fucking murder. It’s not good, but it’s also not like he’s the first kid to ever put a hole in drywall.
By the halfway mark, this book just feels like trauma porn for the sake of it. The technical skill to write a character who does terrible things and still comes out morally gray was…not there, to say the least. Olivia was, plain and simple, a bad parent for most of this book’s major decisions and yet written to be sympathetic due to her backstory of abuse—abuse that seemed “necessary” for her character to have gone through so she would have reason to doubt her son for the entire book, which is…certainly one way to work domestic violence into your book. Yikes again.
Not to mention the abortion scene that was thrown into Olivia's backstory and then never mentioned again. The scene itself was done tactfully, but it had no place in the story. Again, it came across as unneeded trauma porn rather than a well-thought-out portrayal of serious issues. Less really is more sometimes, especially when you're already hitting on three or four huge topics. Some significant paring down on moments like these would have let the core issues shine much brighter instead of playing Bingo with them—these are all important issues that deserve portrayal in fiction, but possibly not all at once, y’know?
The “police work” in Asher's case was also incredibly frustrating. Conversations that should have been inadmissible in court and/or available as audio recordings were twisted to make Asher seem like he was lying about questions the police never asked him. I get that you want your readers riled up about the justice system, but now all your characters have committed a crime and lied under oath, claiming Asher explicitly stated he had ‘never been in Lily’s bedroom’ and there should, based on everything the story has told us, be proof that this was never said in evidence. You cannot make up fake evidence. The American justice system is horribly, horribly broken, but maybe not to the extent that a prosecutor can directly contradict the record for an entire year-long trial with no consequence and the defense not only doesn't even bother to bring it up, but gaslights Asher for being upset about it. Throw the whole case in the garbage at this point because nobody is taking this shit seriously. (Anyway, if you seriously mean to tell me that the police in America care so much about prosecuting a straight white man for the death of a POC trans woman that they’d go so far as making up evidence…boy would I like some of what you’re smoking. The small town NH setting makes it especially unbelievable. As a local, I don’t understand why people think New England is resoundingly liberal—it’s Conservative/Free State hell where the characters are meant to be from. Seriously, look up ‘the town that went feral’—in the early 2000s, Free Staters overran an NH town close to the fictional location of our main characters with BEARS. Where is this liberal utopia you’ve found?)
The same issues exist with Lily, although she has the benefit of more engaging chapters. Regardless, Lily never receives any sort of criticism from this book for her immense dishonesty towards everyone in her life. Every time we get close, there are some really odd lines excusing her from honesty about everything simply because of her past and the risk of revealing herself as trans. Granted, the consequence seems to be that she’s dead, but this book tried its hardest to paint her as a good person while demonstrating exactly how untrustworthy she is.
Lily lies to Asher and her friends about most major aspects of her life—a suicide attempt, making up the death of her father, her trans identity, why she's moved and where she's lived, etc. Point blank, most of these lies in context are...not great. Being friends or in a relationship with someone for months only to find out they’ve made up a fake past is terrifying. Lily being trans is used as the excuse for not telling Asher exactly how dangerous her father was, and there's an ongoing and infuriating discussion of "do I really have to be honest with people if it could out me?" as if that's a valid justification for putting others in danger and building all your relationships on major lies.
Regardless of how someone has been previously hurt for telling the truth, I would not be able to be in a relationship with someone who not only couldn't tell me the truth but lied repeatedly and extensively about it. This part cannot be reduced to just how difficult and dangerous it can be to come out, because that’s really not what it is, but this is exactly what the book tries to do. Mad Honey cuts Lily a LOT of slack for her behavior under the guise of discussing coming out. Meanwhile, Asher is crucified for needing some time to process that his girlfriend doesn’t trust him and why that may be. Weird, weird take.
And, okay, here's the final gripe: for the amount of detail on gender surgery and transition, especially the ones Lily herself went through, there was a lot of incorrect information. Lily is explicitly stated to have had a type of reassignment surgery that cannot produce a fully self-lubricating vagina. Pages later, they spend an agonizing amount of time in court explaining how vaginoplasty results can be self-lubricating, indistinguishable from AFAB genitals, and that this was the case for Lily—both irrelevant and inaccurate to the type of surgery the character underwent. Daily Double for a ten page lecture and a plot hole in one. Why is nobody cross-examining these witnesses and pointing out the literal lies? I suspect it’s because the authors never bothered to do the research. My best guess is this book was an irresponsible money grab, because it certainly wasn’t crafted from a place of care. Mad Honey is at BEST a severe detriment to LGBT literature filled with blatant mistakes.
The “blatant inaccuracy” shit doesn’t even stop at the LGBT issues. This book failed majorly at capturing New England culture/stereotypes/visuals. Not to mention the WILDLY incorrect definitions of things like premeditation under New Hampshire law that could’ve been fixed with ONE Google search. The authors confusingly claim that in New Hampshire, premeditated murder is defined as “even thinking of killing someone for a second before you do it.” Never in my fucking life have I heard such a ridiculous idea—this would make almost ALL murders premeditated and almost totally eliminate manslaughter if “premeditation” means “thinking of something during the moment you’re doing it” which is essentially impossible not to do BECAUSE THAT IS HOW THOUGHTS WORK.
Considering the amount of plotting and research the authors’ notes would have you believe went into Mad Honey, I was disappointed with the complete lack of realism and effort from every angle. Seriously, did an editor ever even see this slapdash pile of nonsense? Where on Earth are all these positive reviews coming from?
In summary, this book broke me.
EDIT: One month out from finishing Mad Honey, I’m dropping my rating from 2 stars to 1. None of the positives and all of the negatives stuck with me—I can’t justify giving this more than one star no matter how much I enjoyed a few of the sections at the time.
kelsklipp's review against another edition
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
sundeviljewels's review against another edition
4.0
Wow! Wow! Wow! Thank you both for opening my eyes to this topic!
eedreyer's review against another edition
5.0
Best book I’ve read all year. Surprising, believable, unpredictable. Loved all of the relationships and also the extra benefit of learning about bees and honey! Highly recommend.
eponin3's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
know_it_nalls's review against another edition
emotional
informative
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
ashleync7's review against another edition
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
al3xnw4l's review against another edition
4.0
definitely could've been shorter -- middle of the book got a bit boring and repetitive and then it felt like the end was rushed. loved how a big part of it was how your experiences affect your perception of others and other situations. the analogy between the plot and bees was powerful