(no subject)

[skygiants]

The Honeys -- a YA horror novel about a genderfluid kid investigating his sister's death by hanging out with the popular kids at her summer camp -- was one of our recent book club selections and to be honest I did not expect to particularly like it, because [not being a Teen] my personal hit rate with Teen Books About Queer Experiences is fairly lukewarm.

In actual fact however I had a great time, and by this I mean some parts were genuinely very good and some parts were wildly entertaining and the ending goes completely off the rails in a way that had me laughing all the way through the last chapter.

The book begins with Our Hero Mars' twin sister Caroline coming home from her extremely ritzy summer camp in the middle of the night, apologetically attempting to murder him, and then crashing to her death down the stairs. During her funeral, Mars sees an ominous bee crawling out of her head.

Mars, who is AMAB and genderfluid, has not attended Extremely Ritzy Summer Camp in some years due to struggles wrt the Strict Gender Dichotomies of the Summer Camp Experience; however, given Caroline's murder attempt and death and head potentially full of bees, he decides it is time to give it another go. Although he is constantly thwarting sinister acts of probably-homophobic sabotage in the largely unfriendly boys' cabin, his main goal is to bond with the Honeys, the cool teen girls of summer camp who get skip out on most of the obligatory summer camp rituals and instead get to live in a bucolic lakeside cabin by themselves and Tend the Bees ... and the Honeys do really seem to like Mars! they want to hang out and do makeup and mourn Caroline together and help Mars hook up with the cute nature lad who junior-counselors in his cabin! but! perhaps! is there something sinister and a little culty about them??

Obviously there is -- and also the Extremely Ritzy Summer Camp is SO funny in terms of how fancy is -- but the book also does quite a good job of making the obviously sinister and cult-y lifestyle of The Honeys also look genuinely appealing and the scenes of supportive shared grief over Caroline in particular are really nice in a way that I'm guessing is reminiscent of Midsommar [I have not seen Midsommar]. But of course we must eventually get to the bottom of the Head Full of Bees situation, which is where things start to get very weird and very funny.

It turns out of course that the Honeys are a telepathic bee-connected hivemind who occasionally sacrifice Boys Who Do Crimes to The Hives to make the delicious ritual blood honey. Also, most of the summer camp boys are head-full-of-bees drones -- including the cute nature lad that Mars has been flirting with all summer, who no sooner confesses his affections to Mars than the bees compel him into a murder attempt.

Heroically, Mars manages to escape from bee camp! He calls his parents to pick him up from a nearby diner! His parents come and get him ... and drug him and drive him RIGHT BACK TO SUMMER CAMP. The telepathic bee-connected teen girls aren't the problem, for the most part they are genuinely trying their best, the problem is INSTITUTIONAL and that the adults of summer camp have FOR GENERATIONS been pushing teen girls into utilizing their bee-connected hivemind powers for their own ends! The bees let them make stock market predictions somehow?

Anyway, Caroline's problem was that they wanted her to become Queen Bee of the bee-connected hivemind, but she cracked under the pressure and couldn't take it, and she tried to murder Mars because! she knew! Mars was next in line to become Queen Bee and she couldn't think of any other way to try and save him! Diversity win: your parents affirm your gender-fluid identity because it allows them to fill your head with bees and use your teen girl powers to control the stock market!

The sinister ritual completes, and Mars gets Queen Bee'd, but! he is able to mobilize the power of the Honeys to instead destroy the evil summer camp adults, including his parents! Now he is rich and inheritor of their wealth and leader of a big bee teen girl hivemind, which in a way is everything that he has ever wanted. Or .... Is It?? Oh Well, Too Late Now!

I also laughed very hard when I hit the author's note at the end and it's revealed that the strange hallucinogenic telepathic board game that the Honeys play with Mars is just the author's in-joke about not being able to understand Azul.

Comments

[snickfic]

Wow!! I don't know that I need to read this book for myself, but I greatly enjoyed hearing about you reading it! That is a wild ride indeed. It reminds me a bit of Bunny by Mona Awad, which is about a group of culty female grad students called, you guessed it, Bunnies. They too do weird supernatural things to boys.

[skygiants]

A proud tradition tbh! At one point one of the Honeys steals a line from Jennifer's Body, which I only know from having seen that line equally-much-quoted on my Tumblr dash ....

[brownbetty]

Are the girls constantly making bee puns and pretending they're not?

[skygiants]

The book does have a quite legitimate sense of humor but there absolutely could and should be more bee puns, IMO.

[hermionesviolin]

I've read mixed reviews of this book, so I'm pleased to hear you were delighted by it. (And I am thus not reading behind the spoiler text, since you have increased the likelihood that I will read the book myself.)

[skygiants]

My expectations were pretty low and it definitely vaulted over them! I hope you enjoy it if you read it :D

[troisoiseaux]

This is WILD and I'm so glad you shared this with us all.

[skygiants]

TRULY SO HAPPY TO

[osprey_archer]

As someone who has seen Midsommar but has not read this book, I can confirm that I started thinking "that sounds like Midsommar" right when you started talking about the culty-but-weirdly appealing Honeys, so it may indeed be the same vibe! Now we just need to find someone who has experienced both things to be sure...

[skygiants]

It honestly felt to me very in conversation with a lot of cult classic Horror About Pastoral Landscapes And/Or Gender (Midsommar, Jennifer's Body, The Wicker Man) but I have not. seen any of these movies. so I am going entirely off Tumblr gifsets and Wikipedia summaries .... we do indeed need a scholar to weigh in!

[jazzfish]

The bees let them make stock market predictions somehow?

Did not see this coming, laughed loud enough to startle the cat.

[skygiants]

ME ABSOLUTELY NEITHER

[sholio]

Okay, this sounds like an absolutely WILD ride.

Diversity win: your parents affirm your gender-fluid identity because it allows them to fill your head with bees and use your teen girl powers to control the stock market!

AMAZING.

[skygiants]

Pros and cons! Pros and cons!!!

[oracne]

That sounds delightfully wacky!

[skygiants]

It was extremely fun!

[evewithanapple]

. . . I am putting this on purchase request at the library immediately so I can use it as part of our Queer Teen Book Club and watch the youths react to it in real time.

[skygiants]

PLEASE REPORT BACK

[genarti]

It really is better and more nuanced than I expected it to be! I especially appreciated that half the time when Mars makes snappy comebacks or mentally judgy eyerolls at people, it's very clearly Mars's POV, and while sometimes it's very justified, a good bit of the time it's clear that other people do actually have reasons for e.g. not wearing gladiator sandals on a hiking trip no matter how edgily gender-bending that fashion choice might be. It felt very accurate for a smart, self-assured teenaged protagonist who is, in fact, still a teenager, rather than an Authorial Voice Of Which Characters We Should Care About. And the author did a great job of capturing the summer camp experience (except making it just ABSURDLY fancy, lol), with weird but universally accepted traditions and so on.

I admit I was still kind of annoyed by the end ~diversity win~ (it felt very what these girls REALLY needed was someone who isn't a girl to take charge of them! to me with how sme of the details played out, even though I was glad to see a gender-fluid main character, and did like Mars a lot), and the hilarity of the gonzo ending didn't fully counterbalance the way it makes zero sense. But I expected to dislike the book, and found it a flawed but fun read instead, so kudos to the author! And one cannot deny that it's a gleefully wild ride.

[skygiants]

The voice had so much genuine personality to it! And yeah despite how absurdly fancy the summer camp was I also got hit with SO much genuine enjoyable nostalgia at so many points.

[conuly]

You pick the most batshit books to review.

[skygiants]

Well, I try to review all the books I read, but some are more fun than others ....

[passingbuzzards]

“STOCK MARKET PREDICTIONS” IS NOT WHERE I EXPECTED THIS TO GO

(This is incredible, thank you for this summary, ALSO might genuinely be funny enough to make up for naming the lead character Mars)

[skygiants]

Yeah, I genuinely think 'Mars' was earned! By the time one learns enough about the bees one doesn't even notice!!

[schneefink]

That sounds wild and hilarious.
Sidenote, is Mars going to continue sacrificing Boys Who Do Crimes to make ritual blood honey? ^^

[skygiants]

One definitely gets the impression that yes.

[asakiyume]

The bees let them make stock market predictions somehow?


Man, if bees can do this, SURELY they can manipulate the producers of pesticides out of business and support research into colony collapse etc. and do, IDK, more to help their situation. Or maybe it's just more fun to live all that through your human proxies--I mean there you are, collectively piloting your meat mecha, I guess?

So Mars & Co. literally destroy the parents? Wow! I come not with honey but with a sting, sayeth the Lord ... or something.

[skygiants]

These bees seem much more interested in chasing down Bad Men than in fixing colony collapse for some reason ... something something symbiotic relationship? They ALSO are living off the blood honey, I guess they've gotten a taste for it ...

They literally destroy the parents! Farewell to the adults! Mars may be an orphan now but is anyone really an orphan when you've got your teen hivemind at your back?

[chestnut_pod]

THE BEES LET THEM MAKE STOCK MARKET PREDICTIONS.

Also, I don't understand Azul either and would honestly rather it was hallucinogenic, because then someone might have fun >:(

[skygiants]

Mars does seem to have enjoyed the inexplicable experience before it got Spooky!

[rachelmanija]

NOT THE BEES!!!

Haha, this sounds amazing. I have a book called The Bees on my TBR stack which I somehow think will be less enjoyable than this.

[skygiants]

Not too late to swap them out!

[blotthis]

becca what the fuck

[skygiants]

I didn't even pick this one! this one was thrust upon me!

[superborb]

Azul?! Out of all games lol, I wonder if it's because it seems like it should be simple?

[skygiants]

It's also very Aesthetic which I think is not not a consideration here ...

[nevanna]

I wrote recently about this book (which I liked a lot, and I also loved your review of it) in a post about summer camp books in general, and made the perhaps overly bold suggestion that it did for bees what Revolutionary Girl Utena did for roses. Is that anything?