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Oct. 29th, 2023 05:22 pmThe 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. ( not the bees, not the bees! )
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. ( not the bees, not the bees! )
