Honey
A Novel
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4.2 • 17 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A dark, provocative, adrenaline-rush of a novel about a graduate student who murders bad men and justifies it in the name of feminism, by a bold new voice in fiction
“A wry and erudite take on the dark-academia genre.”—The Atlantic
“A darkly comic novel about the tricky politics of race, sex, violence and love . . . entertaining (and quietly damning).”—Elle
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) BY MARIE CLAIRE AND ESQUIRE
She just wants to know what justice feels like.
Yrsa is bored: bored with her PhD program, her entitled students, and the never-ending pages of racial violence and feminist theory she has to read. But most of all, she’s bored with the men in her life—especially the bad ones.
And then, one sunny afternoon, she accidentally kills one.
Suddenly a problematic professor is dead, and Yrsa, well—she’s no longer bored.
Emboldened, she starts to chase the high, and soon no misbehaving sexist man within commuting distance is safe.
Finally Yrsa’s academic research feels useful. But how long can killing in the name of feminist and racial solidarity justify her actions? And how long until her actions—and buried family secrets—come back to unravel her?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We couldn’t get enough of the righteous, sarcastic, and at least a little bit deranged heroine at the heart of this morally gray thriller. Yrsa is writing a PhD thesis on Afropessimism at Cambridge University, and she’s in a rut. She’s so sick of bad behavior from bad men that when she accidentally kills the professor who stole her best friend’s research, something in her snaps. She becomes a sort of vigilante, exacting lethal justice on racists and misogynists during semi-dissociative episodes that slowly become almost as alarming as the fact that she’s, well, killing people. Yrsa’s story may be pitched at a slightly heightened tone, but her anger is fierce and palpable. Her inner monologues about bloodlines and sense memory and the millennia of crimes that have gone unpunished had us utterly transfixed as she struggled again and again to redefine her purpose—both as a killer and as a scholar. If you love a dark, disaffected female main character, you’ll love Honey.
