#lisa freeman
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.
