Honey Girl

 Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers, 241 pages

Grace Porter has just spent a decade driving herself to burnout to earn her PhD in astronomy, only to find (disappointingly, but not surprisingly) that the job she was supposed to have guaranteed had little space for all of her as a queer woman of color. So, reeling from the sudden lack of driving force in her life, her and her friends go to Vegas and she gets drunk married to a woman she has just met. Then, months later and still struggling with burnout, her family's expectations, and her own deteriorating mental health, she decides to spend the summer in New York getting to know her new wife, Yuki.

This book was not at all what I expected. I think there's an expectation when I see "romance novel" that I'll be getting into a romantic comedy, which was really furthered by the fact that we started off with the premise of getting drunk married in Vegas. But that's not at all what this was. It was honestly hardly a romance novel, and more a novel about aching loneliness and the crushing weight of both other people's expectations and your own. It's also part of a relatively small genre I'm realizing I enjoy which I've been thinking of as "coming of age novels for adults," which explore the space of aimlessness and emptiness that can happen after graduation (Portrait of a Thief is another good example). This novel is sad and beautiful and entirely unexpected, and I really enjoyed it.