Mad Honey

Author: Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
​Reviewer: Beryl Eichenberger
There’s no doubt that this book is already a best seller and rightly so. Jodi Picoult deals with current, contemporary issues and dissects, researches and reaches into the darkest corners to pull out all that is important. Mad Honey is no different but in this novel she has worked with another 

author, which for me was the interesting part. And the back story here is what got me! Jennifer Finney Boylan had a dream in 2017 of her writing a novel with Jodi Picoult. Boylan is transgender, has written many novels and an acclaimed memoir ‘She’s Not There’ and was on Picoult’s radar. The dream involved ‘a young trans girl who had died, her boyfriend who had been accused of the murder and the boy’s mother who was torn between the compelling evidence of her son’s guilt and the love she bore him in her heart’.
Her tweet ‘I dreamed I was co-authoring a book with Jodi Picoult’ got a DM from Picoult and the rest, as we say, is history.
This is a masterful story, seamlessly written as it opens up the world of transgender rights in a way that makes you sit back and think deeply about your own reactions. What would happen if your child or a friend revealed they were trans. Nothing of course is the answer – you love them for who they are not what they are, but as we know this is often not the case and Mad Honey is the lens through which we see this.  
Lily and her mother Ava have moved to a small to a small town in New Hampshire. Ava is a tough woman, a ranger, whose protection of the environment is as fierce as she protects her daughter.  This fresh start is what Lily needs to begin her new life.  A talented cellist, gentle, kind and highly intelligent she is trans. At school she becomes friends with the outgoing Maya, best friends with Asher. Asher’s mother Olivia and Ava have much in common – they both escaped abusive marriages when their children were threatened, Olivia returning to her hometown to take over the family bee-keeping business. Complicated backgrounds for these two teenagers who fall in love. As their relationship develops Lily feels she is safe enough to tell Asher the truth. Then Lily is found dead and Asher is the accused.
That we can never truly leave the past behind is inescapable. It follows you, shapes you and can tear you apart, and this story explores the wounds, the depths of hurt, abuse, jealousy, and how we struggle to heal.
As the narrative flips between characters and past and present, a compelling story unfolds, one that has an authentic voice that speaks from the heart. How well do we ever know those we love, how hard will we fight for them and what happens when we doubt them. The book plays out the courtroom drama, the uncertainties of belief and human failing that leads to tragedy.
Tensely emotional the story is raw in places, predictable in others but Picoult and Finney have produced a fine book that speaks to the trials we face by being the person we know we are and assuming our identity. And the juxtaposition of the bees alongside the story is a clever analogy between the workings of nature and human societies which sharpens the focus. It is a book that will incite conversations that need to be had and one that dives deep into a subject that is part of our humanity. ​