Morgan Rogers

A refreshingly timely and relatable debut novel about a young woman whose life plans fall apart when she meets her wife. 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 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. 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.

Honey Girl

“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 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.

A Novel

Mey-Thip Mortensen

She lowers her voice, so not even her echo will hear her beg.

Why did the universe choose me, if it knew I would have to fight tooth and nail?

“I think lonely creatures ache for each other because who else can understand but someone who feels the same dark, black abyss?”

, can understand loneliness if not someone who sits in solitude all their own?

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.

Sarah Wood

Here is the thing about the tar, the sludge, the inky black poison. Once it starts its ascent out of your body, there is nothing you can do to stop it. It tastes like volcano ash and fire, and you must taste it, and gag on it, and ultimately, you must spit it out. There comes a time when you cannot swallow it any longer. 

Maybe there is no difference between the weighted, heavy locks in Paris and the knockoffs in Las Vegas tourist shops. Maybe there is no difference in dreams and the things you barely remember. 

Dedicated to the girls with claws. Let them fear you.

Andrea

Morgan A. Rogers

"With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, 28-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls' trip to Vegas to celebrate. 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, 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."--Publisher's description.

Rebecca Hurd

Took me a little while to get into the book!! This story is full of self reflection and learning how to be the best for yourself first!! Loving yourself is a journey!!

Andrea Morales

“she is in the stars, bold and bright and beautiful. she is strong and unwavering, and not filled with the sour taste of failure and the weight of unknowns.” 

the loveliest debut novel. 
me sentí identificada con los struggles de Grace en muchas ocasiones: from the severe and expectation-heavy dad, to the anxiety of not knowing where you fit in the world, to the wonderful-ness that is a found family and the warm feeling of the queer experience and self love. 
amé los personajes, Yuki !!! 
todos tenían sus propios problemas, and i loved the message que es bueno to rely on them, pero tú también debes convertirte en alguien they can rely on, too. 

we’re basically all living on a floating rock in outer space, but i think that’s why we have to make every moment beautiful;
we don’t have a purpose, we have to make one for ourselves.

This is the story I didn't know I needed. I laughed & cried, and cried while I laughed. A gorgeous gorgeous story. 

Kate B-L

kait

i feel like this had so much potential but i can not even begin to explain how disappointed i was, especially since this has been on my tbr for months and months. the book felt very repetitive, especially because of how many times her name is said and her inner thoughts just became cringe-worthy to read. i just wish this would have been better.

Nice, didn’t really stand out to me. Recommend by someone I felt I had to finish and I’ve read books longer then this one & found it hard to get through. 

Edna Aviles

Kendall McClain

Love grace and her friend group, but felt a bit too YA for me

Jenna Whitlow

All I wanted was a slightly dramatic, cheesy, sapphic romance and I got that with the added bonus of existential dread and the fear that my career will be a failure and I'll suddenly turn 30 and realize I haven't been living my life for myself and I've just been doing everything I'm doing to make the people around me happy.

So fun!

jess larry

tried to give it a chance but clearly it feels like there's no plot, & the narration style isn't really my cup of tea

4.5 
this was so good! i want more books about painfully lonely messy lesbians trying to figure out what they want from their lives and maybe see if that includes being together

This book was so good. i kept envisioning it as a movie and that made it so much better. The best debut novel i’ve ever read. It talks about so many important topics, not just racisms and sexism, but it talks about mental health and the importance of dealing with your issues.

Thea Søsveen

Cloudface

This book frustrated me up until the ending, when the problems I had with the main character were finally addressed. So I think it was worth reading but I didn’t enjoy most of the process of reading it. The dialogue felt unnatural and the main character was surrounded by friends whose lives seemed to revolve around her. We don’t learn much about her friends beyond the ways that they benefit the main character. But if you want a quick read with a diverse cast and sapphic rep, I would still recommend giving this book a try.

Roman

it was a good book! but i thought the main plot would have been about the love story between grace and yuki - that's why i bought it - so it was a bit of a let down when it was mainly about finding your true self and knowing what you want to do in the future, which isn't a bad thing and it wasn't a bad thing!! i overhyped it myself, and i'm mad at myself for that reason. 

overall it was a really good book, i would have enjoyed it more if i didn't overhype it.

angie

Matylda M

3.5+ / 4- - made me cry multiple times, but wasn't a heavy read which is nice considering the topic(s).

jupiter

This book made me feel so many emotions.

Grace is a very important character to me. I see a lot of myself in her and that made certain parts hard to read but also very enjoyable.

I love how unique every character was and how they all stood out from each other. Sometimes you come across a big cast with no personality but i didn’t see that here.

👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩 yukigrace

What an absolutely beautiful book. I just finished it and I needed to sit down and just breathe a few times.

This book is amazing. I could really connect with all of the characters, especially with all of Grace's struggles (those hit too close to home, lol), and the author didn't try to paint any of the characters as "the bad person": every single one of them had their good and bad things, and that's what made it so believable and easy to relate to. I think it treats the subject of "grown up that has to start facing the real world" really amazingly and still does it in a beautiful manner.

I will say that at times the dialogues felt unrealistic. Some of Grace's and Yuki's conversations, some of Grace's thoughts. It was most visible when she was describing the therapists; the male one was completely unrealistic. There were also some spelling/grammar errors. Also, the parts where she spoke to herself out loud (and I'm thinking about that scene near the ending where she grabs the champagne bottle and carefully walks toward the flashlight; it made me cringe). But other than those times where it was overdone, the writing was so beautiful. The descriptions, the way Grace talks about her own problems. I loved it.

I found comfort in her path to finding herself. It was heartfelt, it was real and it was raw: thank you, Morgan Rogers, for such a beautiful story.

brianna

“if you’re out there, honey girl, i am singing you a song. it’s a good song. it wont lure you to the depths of the ocean. it’s a song that leads you just to me, i think, if you’re listening.” 
 

honey girl has unexpectedly made its way into my top 3 favorites of all time. its one of those books that i feel came to me at the perfect time in my life. morgan rogers has such a way with words and capturing loneliness and the feeling of failure. 

i feel like most authors try too hard to make their writing seem flowery and poetic, but it feels so natural in honey girl. i’ve fallen in love with morgan rogers’ writing style and i’m so excited to read more in the future. until then, i’ll just continue rereading honey girl till i drop.

Midori Kobayashi

3.5/5stars


My question to all the lonely creatures out there is who is your siren? Who is your fellow lonely creature who sees into the very core of you and knows which song to sing? What song do they sing for you, and do you follow? What would happen if you did?


This book was not what I expected it to be, but like in the best way possible. I was thinking this is gonna be another sappy gay romance, my lonely heart is gonna dread and yet enjoy reading. But this book is so not that. So not JUST that. It is so much more. 

It's about the protagonist's self-development and her romance is just a secondary thing that is weaved into her life story and kinda plays an important part in the existential crisis she had and the way she builds herself back up from there. 

Please do not go into this one expecting just some cute romance and sapphic moments (although there are plenty of moments that made my heart yearn) this book has so much more to offer and if this is turned into an indie movie someday, I will be the first one to watch!


  Book Trigger Warnings- discussion and depictions of mental illness, self-harm (scratching skin, nails digging into skin as anxiety coping mechanism), past suicide attempt by side character, depictions of anti-Blackness and homophobia in the academic and corporate settings, casual alcohol consumption, minor drug use (marijuana), discussions of racism experienced by all characters of color, past limb amputation due to war injury (side character), past parent death (side character)

Kristen Claiborn

Grace worked her tail off on her perfect plan, making it to the ripe-old-age of 29 with a fresh PhD and…well that’s it. Graduating from college was like hitting a brick wall for that girl, she was a little dizzy and had no idea where to go after that. So she went to Vegas, got stupid drunk, and married a woman she had just met and didn’t even remember her name the next morning. That certainly didn’t fit into her plan, but since she seemed to be fresh out of next steps, she hopped on a plane to New York City to fall in love with her wife. Grace seems to have no idea how to live her life without school, and she struggled emotionally without everything that came after her graduation day. That poor girl falls apart in every way, completely running away to hide at her mother’s orange orchard. 
	Grace is one of the most loveable characters I have read so far in 2021. Rogers was able to create an overachiever that wasn’t a stick-in-the-mud. Her friends were so neat, and then Rogers went and made Yuki’s friends neat also. What are the odds that there are that many neat friend groups??? Maybe I should leave the house more often and make friends, because I wanted those people to be my friends. Grace did seem to have some pretty lame parents though. Her dad was completely rigid (though her stem-mom seemed pretty nifty), and her mom was completely absent. She didn’t seem to have a very good relationship with either of them, which would explain why she fell apart in New York, she didn’t really have a good emotional upbringing. There’s a large part of me that wants to know more about Grace and Yuki’s story, but there’s another part of me at peace with where this book ended.

tina

i had a wonderful time reading this book! it’s one of those stories that i wished were a little bit longer. it took me awhile to get into the writing style bec even though the writing was beautiful, it was quite repetitive and it kept bothering me sometimes. however, that really didn’t take so much of my enjoyment of this book bec i ended up loving the characters very much. i especially love the bond and the relationship that they had with one another. this is one of those books that poetically captures that feeling of loneliness and uncertainty and it does so much more than that as well! overall, def a solid debut!

Emily Pauls

mars

brb gonna go to vegas and drunk marry a cute girl

Sandra

It was a little predictable but just what I looked for to be more specific it gets a 3.5 but would read again. Recommend if you want a soft comforting romance

I really loved the writing style and the description of thoughts and emotions of the MC. As a person in their twenties I heavily related to the ups and downs of this MC also! Love love this book & I can’t wait for more from this author!

Honey Girl

Reviews

Highlights