Last week I posted my fall reading list and I’m back to review the first book, which I had early access to thanks to NetGalley. The book is now available to all:

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

Picoult was the author of a book I truly enjoyed last year – Wish You Were Here – so that’s why it first attracted my attention.

In Mad Honey, two moms are starting over; their kids fall in love. One ends up tragically dead and the other is accused of murder. What follows is a family and courtroom drama as well as a murder mystery and a love story told from two points of view (the mom of the accused and the girl who died). Without giving more plot details away, here’s why I liked the book:

  1. It was something different! After so much historical fiction, I enjoyed that this book made me think about different topics and emotional experiences. The closest reading experience I can relate it to is reading Kristin Hannah’s Night Road. A mom worrying about her kid(s).
  2. I learned about honey. One of the narrators is a beekeeper so there are passages about her work but also snippets of allegory related to beekeeping and honey. Bees are fascinating! I didn’t realize how much so until reading this book, and I loved the experience of learning about something scientific while reading a fictional story.

“According to natural selection, bees should not exist. Although workers construct the comb, tend to the queen, and feed the larvae, they’re sterile themselves, and don’t pass those productive genes to the next generation. Plus, stinging is suicide, and passing on a suicide gene makes no biological sense. And yet, the species has been around for a hundred million years.”

3. It was full of surprises. Besides a plot twist I did not see coming, even more surprises were included in the epilogue and appendices that I truly enjoyed.

So although I’m not telling you much, I hope you’ll give Mad Honey at try. But not literally because this type of honey is poisonous which I also learned in the book!

I received a free download of this book in exchange for an honest review.