Honey Girl

Ooof.  Grace is a very relatable POV FMC with very relatable anxiety, and that's even before taking into account all the model minority BS she's trying to navigate.  If you can't identify with the burnout that comes from having to sustain peak performance for years, you're probably not going to like this story.

My only complaints:

• The relationship with the friends at the beginning is a little hard to parse, and I admit those friends got on my nerves more often than not.
• Some of the late-story character choices may have made sense for the characters, but took me out of the story for a bit.

Some people may bounce off the more poetic, image-painting prose, but I really enjoyed it.

Rep: biracial Black FMC with anxiety disorder; Japanese-American FMC; side character with borderline.

Sex: <spoiler>Few soft-R-rated sex scenes.</spoiler>

Tags: #AccidentalMarriage #BIPOC #FamilyIssues #FoundFamily #Gayborhood #InversionOfControl #SinglePOV #StructureMeetsWhimsy #Therapy #ThirdPersonPOV #Trauma #VacationTravel.

I'd seen this book around but hadn't really planned on picking it up until I saw it listed on a Best Romances of the Year list. I was intrigued by the premise. Grace wakes up after an uncharacteristically drunk night in Vegas wearing a BRIDE t-shirt and with vague memories of a girl she met the night before. She is at a transition point in her life. She just finished her graduate degree and isn't sure what exactly she wants to do next now that she's checked off all the steps on her plan.This is not a light and fluffy book. I wouldn't exactly call it dark but it is deep. Grace has a lot of issues that come crashing down on her now that she isn't focused solely on her studies. In fact, she's used her studies to hide from a lot of emotional minefields that she would prefer not to negotiate. Grace has a lot of parent problems. Her father is military. He makes everyone call him Colonel - including his family. (That made me wonder what they called him before he got that rank.) He has extremely high expectations of her and she's breaking under the pressure. She's able to achieve her goals but what if that doesn't actually make her happy? Is it ever ok to settle? I hated his character. He really messed her up.She has a different issue with her mother. After their divorce, her mother was mostly out of her life. This gave her abandonment issues. She is working on getting closer to her mother and detaching from her father for her own good. The writing in this book is more lyrical than I normally see in romances. That is especially true of Yuki, Grace's wife, who is a storyteller. Grace finds out about her by listening to her radio show where she talks to lonely people about monsters. Their relationship is beautiful. It is instalove while drunk and then they step back need to decide if they want to try to make this work for real. This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story