Tag: honey

Honey is a novel about a Cambridge PhD student who starts killing men when she discovers the thrill of it. Yrsa is doing a PhD about Afropessimism, dealing with what it is like to be Black at Cambridge, and looking for something that excites her more than sleeping with mediocre men. When she finds herself opposite the Cambridge academic who her best friend believed loved her, Yrsa sees no harm in flicking a bee towards his drink. The only thing is, he’s allergic. And now Yrsa knows how it feels to kill, she wants to keep going.

This is a thrilling ride that is reminiscent of Boy Parts, basically taking the ‘woman killing men whilst not feeling bad about it’ and giving it an academic lens, as Yrsa finds herself enacting the same dynamics of power and violence that she’s meant to be unpacking in her thesis. The third person narration always follows Yrsa, but gives that slight remove from her by not being in first person which works very well to give a literary serial killer tone. The plot follows Yrsa as she gets deeper into the lies needed to keep killing, but there’s a couple of great twists that complicate that narrative and Yrsa’s motivations. There’s quite a few plot points that seem more like red herrings, designed to keep you (and Yrsa) guessing what might catch up with her.

If you like darkly comic literary fiction in the vein of other literary serial killer books, Honey is a great offering that brings commentary on race and gender in a way that complicates things rather than having easy answers. It feels like one of those books that you will end up seeing everywhere as it is very readable and has a classic ‘hot girl who might do anything’ protagonist.