Perfect for readers of QUEENIE, this #OwnVoices coming-of-age debut follows a young black woman just finishing her Ph.D in astronomy who impulsively gets married in Vegas and decides to leave her perfectly ordered life for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.
With her newly completed Ph.D in astronomy in hand, 26-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. Yuki hosts a radio show about monsters and what they reveal of the terrors lurking inside people’s minds, when she’s not waiting tables to make rent. Yuki welcomes Grace into her Harlem apartment and her own tight circle of roommates-turned-family. As Grace knits herself into their firmament, she builds a fantasy summer where a vodka-soaked wedding can last, there is no life roadmap to follow beyond the beating of your heart, and the past is as illusory as the facades of the Vegas strip.
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 need for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.
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“Honey Girl is a fun, heartfelt, and uncompromising look at the risks we take to find love, discover who we are, and what we really want out of life.”
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Catherine Adel West, author of Saving Ruby King