Today I’m joining the blog tour for Honey. My review is written with thanks to Tracy Fenton for inviting me on the tour and to the publisher for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

It is 1997, and Amber Young has received a life-changing call. It’s a chance thousands of girls would die for: the opportunity to join girl group Cloud9 in Los Angeles and escape her small town. She quickly finds herself in the orbits of fellow rising stars Gwen Morris, a driven singer-dancer, and Wes Kingston, a member of the biggest boy band in the world, ETA.

As Amber embarks on her solo career and her fame intensifies, she increasingly finds herself reduced to a body, a voice, an object. Surrounded by the wrong kind of people and driven by a desire for recognition and success, for love and sex, for agency and connection, Amber comes of age at a time when the kaleidoscope of public opinion can distort everything, and one mistake can shatter a career.

Inspired by the starlets of the 90s and noughties who became as infamous for their personal lives as their hypersexualised music videos and lyrics, Honey is a novel about the journey from girlhood to womanhood and how far we are willing to go in the pursuit of love . . .

Review:

I was really intrigued by the premise of Honey, not least because it is set in my era. The late 1990s and early 2000s was a period where I was just getting into music myself and Isabel Banta does an absolutely sterling job of recreating this time, particularly the pressure on popstars to look and behave in a certain way. As a young person, I may not have always recognised this, and I found it interesting to look back on these times in a different light.

Honey is told in the first person by Amber, and this gives the reader plenty of opportunity to get to know her and understand the way she is thinking and feeling at different points in her journey. I often felt sorry for her, and I ultimately wanted her to be happy. She’s surrounded by some interesting characters, especially Gwen, Wes, Axel and Sonny, who all play an important part in her life and despite never hearing directly from their point of view, Isabel Banta gives us a good idea of what they are like, which helps us to sympathise (or not) with them and understand their motives.

I also loved the song lyrics, Wikipedia entries, magazine articles and quizzes which broke up the main text. These are absolutely spot on as I remember them and really helped to create the atmosphere of the time in the novel.

Isabel Banta is a debut author and I look forward to seeing what she does next!

Honey is available from Amazon.

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