Honey
A Novel
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4.5 • 6 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
“Might be the most-anticipated debut novel of the year thanks in part to its perfect-for-Hollywood premise.”—Esquire
“A darkly comic novel about the tricky politics of race, sex, violence and love . . . the entertaining (and quietly damning) read you’ll need to kick off spring.”—Elle
A Most Anticipated Book of the Year: Glamour, Debutiful, Book Riot, Esquire, SheReads, Elle, Stylist
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thompson debuts with the scintillating tale of a disillusioned Cambridge University PhD student who goes on a killing spree. Yrsa is at an impasse ("It must have happened gradually, subtly, her life becoming this tedious"). She struggles to contain her boredom with teaching and her disdain for her privileged students, like the one who claims her lecture on intersectional feminism is too woke. Meanwhile, she's floundering with her dissertation on Afropessimism and women's liberation. The plot kicks into gear after she learns her best friend's research has been stolen by her lover, a married professor named Richardson. Not long afterward, she witnesses Richardson being stung by a bee and neglects to offer help as he goes into anaphylactic shock and dies. Yrsa then begins identifying other "bad" men to kill, such as her former lover and classmate, a white man who fetishizes Black women and admits to joining his friends in devising a ranking scale for the women they've slept with ("Black girl magic, 20 points!"). The homicides revive Yrsa's energy for her dissertation, until she receives an anonymous email reading, "I know what you've done." Thompson adds intriguing layers to the sordid thriller plot, such as accessible descriptions of the complex sociological theories of Saidiya Hartman and Stuart Hall, and the story includes a shocking revelation about the origin of Yrsa's killer instinct. There's a staggering level of depth to this pitch-perfect satire.
