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A LibraryReads Pick
 
“HONEY GIRL is an emotional, heartfelt, charming debut, and I loved every moment of it.”
— Jasmine Guillory, New York Times bestselling author of The Proposal

When becoming an adult means learning to love yourself first.

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 parent’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 constant 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. - (Findaway World Llc)

Library Journal Reviews

Grace Porter has her PhD in astronomy in hand and is ready to embark on her professional career. To celebrate her graduation, responsible, hard-working, overachieving Grace lets her hair down with a girls' trip to Vegas. When she awakens in Vegas with fuzzy memories of vodka-fueled hours, it slowly dawns on her that she got married last night. Her new wife has vanished, leaving only a business card. Grace returns to Portland but is unable to forget the beautiful woman who is at once a stranger and her wife. Under the weight of her parents' expectations and unable to find a job, Grace soon abandons her life plans and heads to New York City to find Yuki, her new wife. She moves in with Yuki and her roommates, who are more like family, and the couple grows closer. Despite their mutual attraction, Grace's emotional scars may make the marriage impossible. Grace is a vivid, realistic character, and York Whittaker's engaging narration is exceptional in creating a rich portrait of this multifaceted figure. VERDICT Listeners will relish this Own Voices debut love story, which focuses on Grace as a young Black woman trying to find a place in her family and in the world.—Maureen Roberts, Baltimore Cty. P.L.