Mad Honey, a review by Joanna

Mad Honey

Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

Hodder & Stoughton

Published November 15th, 2022

464 pages

🐝🐝🐝🐝

Mad Honey is a moving contemporary fiction novel about a New Hampshire teenager accused of the murder of his girlfriend. A collaboration between two bestselling authors – only one of which I had heard of/read previously – this has an unusual alternating chapter structure: Olivia (the boy’s mother) tells her story in traditional (although present tense) format, while Lily’s (the victim) begins on the day of her death and works backwards, revealing the history of her passionate relationship with Asher and the secrets that led to the tragedy. This worked surprisingly well, and the dual author origin doesn’t stop this being a classic Picoult offering, with all the elements you’d expect. To mention the main theme of this would be a major spoiler so I recommend caution reading reviews – but it makes writing about it tricky. Let’s just say that it’s an important issue that the book handles sensitively but that might upset some conservative readers.

Olivia McAfee escaped her abusive marriage to a charming surgeon and has raised her son Asher alone in a small rural town, making a living as a beekeeper. She’s fond of his clever new girlfriend Lily, who only moved to the town a few months earlier, so when Asher is found cradling Lily’s body in a pool of blood, Liv is shocked and horrified – but cannot believe that her beloved child is responsible. Then Asher is arrested and charged with murder, and when his trial begins, Liv discovers that she doesn’t know him as well as she thought, and must face the question – could he be like his father after all?

I hadn’t read a Jodi Picoult novel in years, because they started getting quite repetitive, but this had positive advance reviews and I was ready to try her again. This was an engaging but thought-provoking read covering a variety of social issues, including (trigger warning): domestic abuse, attempted suicide, bullying, depression, youth sexuality and the dysfunctional US criminal justice system. There’s also a lot about beekeeping! Sometimes courtroom dramas can get a bit dull, but the return of recurring Picoult character Jordan McAfee, Liv’s lawyer brother, and avoidance of too much legal procedural detail meant I was never bored. I didn’t anticipate the ending either. I thoroughly enjoyed this and felt educated about an area I don’t know much about without feeling I was being preached at. I’ll end this with a quote: “How similar does someone have to be to you before you remember to see them, first, as human?”

Thanks to NetGalley and for the ARC. I am posting this honest review voluntarily.