Review of Mad Honey

Mad Honey is a story about different types of love: romantic love, the love of a parent for a child, and self-love and acceptance. It’s also a coming of age and identity story. This new book by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan was a typical Picoult book in some ways but not in others. Find out what I thought in my Review of Mad Honey.

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

To be published on October 4 2022 by Ballantine Books

Thanks to the publisher for providing me an advance copy of the book for review.

Synopsis of Mad Honey

Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life in Boston, married to a surgeon and raising a beautiful son, ended when her husband revealed a darker side.

Olivia never imagined she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, taking over her father’s beekeeping business.

Lily Campanello is also familiar with do-overs. When she and her mom relocate to New Hampshire for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start. 

For a short while, these new beginnings are exactly what Olivia and Lily need. Then Olivia’s son Asher falls for the new girl in school, and Lily can’t help but fall for him, too. With Ash, she feels happy for the first time. Yet at times, she wonders if she can she trust him.

Then one day, Olivia receives a phone call: Lily is dead, and Asher is being questioned by the police. Olivia is adamant that her son is innocent. But she would be lying if she didn’t acknowledge that, as the case against him unfolds, she realizes he’s hidden more than he’s shared with her.

Review of Mad Honey

If you’ve read one of Jodi Picoult’s many books, there is much about Mad Honey that will feel familiar to you. Picoult’s books usually have multiple points of view and typically look at some sort of fraught issue.

She’s written about parents who conceive a child to serve as a bone marrow donor for her sick sibling, a Black nurse who is charged with trying to revive a dying baby after her white supremacist parents forbid her to touch their child, and a school shooting.

Her books also often have some sort of a surprising revelation. Mad Honey definitely did. Since the synopsis doesn’t mention it, I am not going to mention it either, even though many other reviewers have. That reveal genuinely surprised me, and I think that going into the book NOT knowing about it made my reading experience a better one.

So, without spoilers (and don’t worry, we can talk about ALL those in my Spoiler Discussion Post for Mad Honey) there were some things about the book that I really loved:

I really loved Lily’s POV.

Given that, as the synopsis reveals, Lily is dead in the book’s present, I thought having her POV in the past was what really made the book shine for me. I can’t say that I really liked all the other characters that much.

I liked the beekeeping stuff … to a point.

While I don’t know that much about beekeeping, I found most of the information really fascinating. Though there was a moment toward the end when I reached my saturation point on it. At that point, I felt that using it as a metaphor on absolutely everything went a little too far.

I was genuinely curious about what happened to Lily.

But I would NOT call this a thriller or a courtroom thriller.

I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call it Mad Honey a mystery. The book doesn’t really present any viable suspects presented. We don’t see any investigation of what happened to Lily, just jump from her death right into the courtroom. Some readers on my discussion post of Mad Honey felt that the legal aspects were a bit sketchy. But let’s discuss that in my Spoiler Post!

And then there were things I liked a lot less:

I was a little disappointed in the ending. The book seemed to be coming to an ending that was interesting and made sense, and then all of a sudden there was this other, final ending that I didn’t feel was adequately set up.

I didn’t connect at all with Olivia. Probably based on my own personal experiences with similar personalities, but I felt she thought she was close to her son and then all I saw was that she just cared about the bees. To an obsessive degree, honestly.

Are you reading this? Tell me in comments.

I want to hear what YOU thought! If you have spoilers thoughts to share, please come to my Spoiler Discussion Post for Mad Honey and let’s hash it all out.