hauntedbyillangelsonly:

“I am not interested in other words for honey. I am interested in honey.”

-Sina Queyras, from MxT

Honey Girl - Morgan Rogers (Übersetzung Beate Schäfer)

Honey Girl – Morgan Rogers (Übersetzung Beate Schäfer)

Als einzige schwarze Frau in einer weißen Umgebung ist die 29-jährige Grace es gewohnt, überall die Beste sein zu müssen – und so hat sie auch ihr Astronomiestudium mit Bestnote bestanden. Doch nach einem Wochenende in Las Vegas gerät ihr sonst so vorbestimmtes Leben aus den Fugen: Verkatert erwacht Grace mit einer Frau namens Yuki im Bett – und einem Ehering am Finger! Und obwohl sie und Yuki…

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current read: honey girl by morgan rogers

I haven’t been able to read this book lately due to my studies, but the writing is so beautiful and the characters feel so authentic, I highly recommend ✨

booksandothersecrets:

booksandothersecrets:

booksandothersecrets:

Hi hello good afternoon I am supplying you with wlw book recs because we all deserve them. Please reblog with your own recs because I’ve only been reading sapphic books for a few months so haven’t covered loads of amazing ones, and hopefully this can become a massive rec list of wlw books :)

Also please please please check the TWs for all of these so that you can stay happy, healthy and safe .

Fantasy:

-The Priory of the Orange Tree: [“We may be small, and we may be young, but we will shake the world for our beliefs”] Look I know you’ve all heard of it. Now read it. Swords. Queer women. Queer women with swords. Dragons. Castles. Battles. Many many many pages of beautiful words. There is nothing missing from this book.

-Cinderella is Dead: [“I don’t want to be saved by some knight in shining armour. I’d like to be the one in the armour, and I’d like to be the one doing the saving.”] Fuck the patriarchy. Dystpian. Gay. Fantasy. Cinderella is dead (wow). Badass main character. Fighting for rights and fighting for eachother. ‍❤️‍‍

-Girls of Paper and Fire: [“Instead of disappearing, she makes me feel reappeared. Reimagined. Her touch shapes me, draws out the boldness that had been hiding in my core.”] We said learning to heal! We said finding safety in eachothers arms! We said fighting the oppressive government! We said fuck the patriarchy! We said fantasy women with swords! We said (kinda) enemies to lovers! We said please check the trigger warnings for this book!

- A Dark and Hollow Star: [“The number one law of the universe is choice, after all — bad things happen to the people who take that option away from you.”] Fantasy that actually uses the words bisexual and lesbian and gay and genderfluid!!! Urban fantasy. Four main characters: two mlm, two wlw. Swords and monsters and fae and powers and tension and fate. Read for the pretty cover, stay for the characters.

-Gideon the Ninth: [“I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it”] This book is dark and horror-y and gory and weird as fuck. This book has skeletons and necromancy and a huge weird haunted house and everyone dying under mysterious circumstances. This book has enemies to i-dont-even-know-what. You will not know what is happening in this book but you will love it. Trust me.

Dystopian:

-We Set the Dark on Fire: [“Maybe this was trust … Giving someone the power to ruin you, betting your life on the belief that they wouldn’t.”] once again, repeat after me: fuck the patriarchy. Rebellion. Enemies to lovers. Dystopian world where every man gets two wives. Guess what happens

Contemporary:

-The Henna Wars: [“I’ve never really thought about having a type. I guess my type is….beautiful girl. Which is a lot of them. Most of them? Pretty much all girls”]. Girl dealing with the aftermath of coming out to her parents has a crush on a girl who is competing against her in a school competition. Main character is muslim, bangladeshi and lesbian and love interest is black, brazilian and bisexual. Just read it. Don’t do it for me. Do it for yourself. You deserve to smile.

-Her Royal Highness: [“PERRY I’VE FOUND AN AMERICAN!”] Look this book may be cliche and predictable and a little ridiculous at times but it made me unfathomably happy so I don’t care. Scottish boarding school+royalty+an american. Enemies to lovers but not im-gonna-stab-you enemies to lovers (which ive read my fair share of truet me), more like why-are-you-so-unbearably-irritating enemies to lovers you know?

-Written in the Stars: [“I’ll break into your apartment and move everything three inches to the left and fuck with your flow, okay?”] Good, solid contemporary new adult romance. Enemies to lovers. Grump x sunshine. Actually has a sex scene (this might not be everyones thing i just noticed wlw books often skirt around them so thought id point it out). Ugh its just so cute.

-You Should See Me In a Crown: [“When I open my mouth, everything happens so fast—the way I can feel her everywhere, the way my hands steady instead of shake where they tangle in her hair because I’ve maybe never felt so grounded before, so rooted in a moment”] What happens when a black queer girl tries for prom queen in a weird, cliquey prom-obsessed school? What happens when one of the other competitors is the unabashedly gay cute new girl? This is what happens. Guys. Guys. Guys. Read this one oh my god. I say this about every book but seriously READ THIS ONE. So so so so so good. Everything you could ever want in a queer coming of age book.

-The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: [“You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until someone stands behind you and says, “It’s OK, you can fall down now. I’ll catch you.”] I know you’ve all heard this but you’re about to hear it again. Queer women in the 50s? Sign me up! Sign yourself up! Buy this book and then read this book! Freak out about this book! Cry about this book! Tell everyone you’ve ever met to read this book! Cry some more about this book! Make this book your whole personality!

Thriller(?):

-The Girls I’ve Been: [“There is no normal. There is just a bunch of people pretending there is. There’s just different levels of pain. Different stages of safe. The biggest con of all is that there’s a normal.”] Thriller. Guns. Menstrual cups. Con artists. That awkward moment when you’re stuck in a bank robbery with two murderous men, a child, your ex boyfriend and your current girlfriend. Not romance but has romantic themes (established relationship). Coming to terms with childhood trauma and abuse. This book is short but deceptively heavy with the themes it deals with so, again, please check the TWs.

Ones on my TBR:

- Last Night at the Telegraph Club

- The Miseducation of Cameron Post

- A Memory Called Empire

- This Is How You Lose the Time War

- Girl, Serpent, Thorn

- This Poison Heart

- One Last Stop

- She Who Became The Sun (omg i want to read this so so so badly)

- The Weight of the Stars

- These Feathered Flames

- Honey Girl

- The Chosen and the Beautiful

- She Drives Me Crazy

Okay I’ve read another one:

-Last Night at the Telegraph Club: [“Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to have nothing keeping you attached to the ground?”] Lesbian club!! Space nerd x aeroplane nerd!! 1950s San Francisco China Town!! Friends to lovers!! Coming to terms with your sexuality!! Drag kings!! Please!! Read!! It!! (Note: this book has some pretty heavy homophobia, especially the parental type and this is never really resolved so please take that into account)

ATTENTION!!! I HAVE MORE!

-Afterlove: [Not everyone knows how to say I love you so learn to hear the different ways they tell you. They say it all the time.] Okay…so I want you to imagine two girls. They’re teenagers. They’re lesbians. They’re in love. They go on dates. They drink too much. They laugh and smile and cry. They get shouted at by their parents. Just normal, teenager things. Now, imagine one of them is dead. And becomes this crazy, badass reaper girl. And is absolutely not prepared to let her girlfriend go (despite, you know, being literally dead). That is this book. And it is GOOD.

-Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake-Dating: [Gathered up in her arms with the beat of Bollywood music all around me, everything feels strangely right. Like none of the bad stuff even matters any more. Because as long as Hani and I are side-by-side, everything will be all right]. Two bengali sapphic grumpy x sunshine girls fake date. That should literally be enough for you to find this book and read it right now. One word to describe it would just be wonderful.Its incredibly joyful, while also discussing things like homophobia, islamaphobia, racism and biphobia. Discusses coming out but isn’t completely focused on it. Also includes at least one set of accepting, loving and supporting parents! Just go to a bookshop or pick up your kindle and READ THIS BOOK. It just made me so…happy.

MORE

-The Midnight Lie: [I love everything more when I leave it. Maybe, then, it’s the most I’ll ever love it.] Magic, magic, magic + lesbians + crime. Honestly, I can’t really remember much about the plot but I do remember that the writing was absolutely GORGEOUS and it was very atmospheric. Basically: good vibes.

booksandothersecrets:

booksandothersecrets:

Hi hello good afternoon I am supplying you with wlw book recs because we all deserve them. Please reblog with your own recs because I’ve only been reading sapphic books for a few months so haven’t covered loads of amazing ones, and hopefully this can become a massive rec list of wlw books :)

Also please please please check the TWs for all of these so that you can stay happy, healthy and safe .

Fantasy:

-The Priory of the Orange Tree: [“We may be small, and we may be young, but we will shake the world for our beliefs”] Look I know you’ve all heard of it. Now read it. Swords. Queer women. Queer women with swords. Dragons. Castles. Battles. Many many many pages of beautiful words. There is nothing missing from this book.

-Cinderella is Dead: [“I don’t want to be saved by some knight in shining armour. I’d like to be the one in the armour, and I’d like to be the one doing the saving.”] Fuck the patriarchy. Dystpian. Gay. Fantasy. Cinderella is dead (wow). Badass main character. Fighting for rights and fighting for eachother. ‍❤️‍‍

-Girls of Paper and Fire: [“Instead of disappearing, she makes me feel reappeared. Reimagined. Her touch shapes me, draws out the boldness that had been hiding in my core.”] We said learning to heal! We said finding safety in eachothers arms! We said fighting the oppressive government! We said fuck the patriarchy! We said fantasy women with swords! We said (kinda) enemies to lovers! We said please check the trigger warnings for this book!

- A Dark and Hollow Star: [“The number one law of the universe is choice, after all — bad things happen to the people who take that option away from you.”] Fantasy that actually uses the words bisexual and lesbian and gay and genderfluid!!! Urban fantasy. Four main characters: two mlm, two wlw. Swords and monsters and fae and powers and tension and fate. Read for the pretty cover, stay for the characters.

-Gideon the Ninth: [“I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it”] This book is dark and horror-y and gory and weird as fuck. This book has skeletons and necromancy and a huge weird haunted house and everyone dying under mysterious circumstances. This book has enemies to i-dont-even-know-what. You will not know what is happening in this book but you will love it. Trust me.

Dystopian:

-We Set the Dark on Fire: [“Maybe this was trust … Giving someone the power to ruin you, betting your life on the belief that they wouldn’t.”] once again, repeat after me: fuck the patriarchy. Rebellion. Enemies to lovers. Dystopian world where every man gets two wives. Guess what happens

Contemporary:

-The Henna Wars: [“I’ve never really thought about having a type. I guess my type is….beautiful girl. Which is a lot of them. Most of them? Pretty much all girls”]. Girl dealing with the aftermath of coming out to her parents has a crush on a girl who is competing against her in a school competition. Main character is muslim, bangladeshi and lesbian and love interest is black, brazilian and bisexual. Just read it. Don’t do it for me. Do it for yourself. You deserve to smile.

-Her Royal Highness: [“PERRY I’VE FOUND AN AMERICAN!”] Look this book may be cliche and predictable and a little ridiculous at times but it made me unfathomably happy so I don’t care. Scottish boarding school+royalty+an american. Enemies to lovers but not im-gonna-stab-you enemies to lovers (which ive read my fair share of truet me), more like why-are-you-so-unbearably-irritating enemies to lovers you know?

-Written in the Stars: [“I’ll break into your apartment and move everything three inches to the left and fuck with your flow, okay?”] Good, solid contemporary new adult romance. Enemies to lovers. Grump x sunshine. Actually has a sex scene (this might not be everyones thing i just noticed wlw books often skirt around them so thought id point it out). Ugh its just so cute.

-You Should See Me In a Crown: [“When I open my mouth, everything happens so fast—the way I can feel her everywhere, the way my hands steady instead of shake where they tangle in her hair because I’ve maybe never felt so grounded before, so rooted in a moment”] What happens when a black queer girl tries for prom queen in a weird, cliquey prom-obsessed school? What happens when one of the other competitors is the unabashedly gay cute new girl? This is what happens. Guys. Guys. Guys. Read this one oh my god. I say this about every book but seriously READ THIS ONE. So so so so so good. Everything you could ever want in a queer coming of age book.

-The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: [“You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until someone stands behind you and says, “It’s OK, you can fall down now. I’ll catch you.”] I know you’ve all heard this but you’re about to hear it again. Queer women in the 50s? Sign me up! Sign yourself up! Buy this book and then read this book! Freak out about this book! Cry about this book! Tell everyone you’ve ever met to read this book! Cry some more about this book! Make this book your whole personality!

Thriller(?):

-The Girls I’ve Been: [“There is no normal. There is just a bunch of people pretending there is. There’s just different levels of pain. Different stages of safe. The biggest con of all is that there’s a normal.”] Thriller. Guns. Menstrual cups. Con artists. That awkward moment when you’re stuck in a bank robbery with two murderous men, a child, your ex boyfriend and your current girlfriend. Not romance but has romantic themes (established relationship). Coming to terms with childhood trauma and abuse. This book is short but deceptively heavy with the themes it deals with so, again, please check the TWs.

Ones on my TBR:

- Last Night at the Telegraph Club

- The Miseducation of Cameron Post

- A Memory Called Empire

- This Is How You Lose the Time War

- Girl, Serpent, Thorn

- This Poison Heart

- One Last Stop

- She Who Became The Sun (omg i want to read this so so so badly)

- The Weight of the Stars

- These Feathered Flames

- Honey Girl

- The Chosen and the Beautiful

- She Drives Me Crazy

Okay I’ve read another one:

-Last Night at the Telegraph Club: [“Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to have nothing keeping you attached to the ground?”] Lesbian club!! Space nerd x aeroplane nerd!! 1950s San Francisco China Town!! Friends to lovers!! Coming to terms with your sexuality!! Drag kings!! Please!! Read!! It!! (Note: this book has some pretty heavy homophobia, especially the parental type and this is never really resolved so please take that into account)

ATTENTION!!! I HAVE MORE!

-Afterlove: [Not everyone knows how to say I love you so learn to hear the different ways they tell you. They say it all the time.] Okay…so I want you to imagine two girls. They’re teenagers. They’re lesbians. They’re in love. They go on dates. They drink too much. They laugh and smile and cry. They get shouted at by their parents. Just normal, teenager things. Now, imagine one of them is dead. And becomes this crazy, badass reaper girl. And is absolutely not prepared to let her girlfriend go (despite, you know, being literally dead). That is this book. And it is GOOD.

-Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake-Dating: [Gathered up in her arms with the beat of Bollywood music all around me, everything feels strangely right. Like none of the bad stuff even matters any more. Because as long as Hani and I are side-by-side, everything will be all right]. Two bengali sapphic grumpy x sunshine girls fake date. That should literally be enough for you to find this book and read it right now. One word to describe it would just be wonderful.Its incredibly joyful, while also discussing things like homophobia, islamaphobia, racism and biphobia. Discusses coming out but isn’t completely focused on it. Also includes at least one set of accepting, loving and supporting parents! Just go to a bookshop or pick up your kindle and READ THIS BOOK. It just made me so…happy.

Before I read Honey Girl I was visualising it as the story of a Hawaiian surfer girl joining a gang and fighting to legitimise herself as a great female surfer. An underdog story: a challenge against the 1970s status quo. A bisexual mixed-race girl exploring her identity and blasting through barriers to win her dreams. What I actually got was a Mean Girls story with recreational drug use and string bikinis.

There is a lot of potential in Honey Girl: the setting is richly painted and realistic; the characters are flawed and human; the style of writing is immersive and confident. It could have been a much tighter novel than it became. The primary problem that I had was with the lack of a true driving plot. Nani wants a lot of things: she wants to be in with the cool girls, she wants a boyfriend, she wants a girlfriend, she wants to mourn her father in a way appropriate to her culture, she wants to run her father’s business. But all of this happens in a dreamy haze, divorced from real life and emotional complexity. Her dad is quickly put on the backburner while she does her best to catch a shallow surfer boyfriend, a born-again Christian whose description revolves around the number of abs tracking down his torso. He is her trophy, not her boyfriend, and far too much of the plot is dedicated Nani’s efforts to achieve beach stardom with him on her arm. Her father’s business is quickly taken out of her hands and barely mentioned for the rest of the novel.

The leader of the cool girls, Rox, is far more interesting than Nani’s boyfriend and has a much heavier presence within the novel, but much more time could have been devoted to her relationship with Nani. There is the suggestion that whatever happens with Rox must remain casual and fleeting, as surf god Nigel McBride gives Nani status and social acceptability despite their lack of spark. I found this approach by the author to be the weaker path taken: even though Nani is clearly defined as a bisexual character, with strong feelings about her sexual orientation and a firm identity, and her relationship with Rox has such spark and vitality that its unexplored potential makes it deeply narratively unsatisfying. This is underlined by the fact that Nani is informed about Hawaiian queer culture and identities, and uses Hawaiian queer language in reference to her own identity, but the author again does not explore this with the consideration that it deserves.

I liked Nani’s popularity games and machinations towards achieving the top; I just didn’t feel like her superficial goals fitted well with the complex character that she was initially presented as. Too many plot threads are introduced and then dismissed, particularly Nani’s conflict between her mixed Hawaiian and European-American heritage. Her relationship with Hawaii and her heritage initially seems to be central to her character’s goals and identity, but it is quickly bogged down beneath her dreams of popularity and never approached in an interrogative way.

This would have been a fantastic novel if it had been set in Hawaii. Every glimpse and reference to Nani’s life in Hawaii seems far more tantalising and interesting than her new life in the USA. A novel about being a queer mixed-race girl in 1970s Hawaii, about a girl who works at her father’s bar and plans to inherit it and shape it into her own enterprise, who wants to surf and throw off the hold of her overbearing best friend, who explores queer Hawaiian culture…that sounds like a far more satisfying novel to me.

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modern-austen:

books I’ve read in 2021:

27.honey girl by morgan rogers

hvrrycameron:

what happened in vegas is tucked away in her suitcase. it is under her shirt in the shape of a key. it is hidden in her hair with the last little bits of dried petals. it hides in the gold ring wrapped around her finger like a brand. it travels back home with grace. it does not stay.

—HONEY GIRL by morgan rogers