4.4
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58,691 ratings
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Alternatingly heart-pounding and heartbreaking. This collaboration between two best-selling authors seamlessly weaves together Olivia and Lily’s journeys, creating a provocative exploration of the strength that love and acceptance require.”—The Washington Post
GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • PEOPLE’S BOOK OF THE WEEK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar
Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life—living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising their beautiful son, Asher—was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined that she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in and taking over her father’s beekeeping business.
Lily Campanello is familiar with do-overs, too. When she and her mom relocate to Adams, New Hampshire, for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start.
And for just a short while, these new beginnings are exactly what Olivia and Lily need. Their paths cross when 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 she wonders if she can trust him completely. . . .
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 the flashes of his father’s temper in Ash, and as the case against him unfolds, she realizes he’s hidden more than he’s shared with her.
Mad Honey is a riveting novel of suspense, an unforgettable love story, and a moving and powerful exploration of the secrets we keep and the risks we take in order to become ourselves.
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ISBN-10
1984818406
ISBN-13
978-1984818409
Print length
480 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Ballantine Books
Publication date
September 04, 2023
Dimensions
5.46 x 1.05 x 8.21 inches
Item weight
12.8 ounces
How similar does someone have to be to you before you remember to see them, first, as human?
Highlighted by 7,039 Kindle readers
The bee itself is considered a symbol of Christ: the sting of justice and the mercy of honey, side by side.
Highlighted by 3,905 Kindle readers
Imagine a sorrow so deep that it batters the hatches of sleep; imagine drowning before you even realize you’ve gone under.
Highlighted by 3,247 Kindle readers
ASIN :
B09Q7XH3N8
File size :
5246 KB
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Praise for Mad Honey
“Alternatingly heart-pounding and heartbreaking . . .This collaboration between two best-selling authors seamlessly weaves together Olivia and Lily’s journeys, creating a provocative exploration of the strength that love and acceptance require.”—The Washington Post
“Gripping . . . This timely and absorbing read will make readers glad these two powerful writers decided to collaborate.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Compelling . . . A well-paced story that highlights several timely issues, with a stimulating courtroom trial that makes it worth reading.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A spellbinding yarn . . . atmospheric . . . riveting . . . Overall, it’s a fruitful collaboration.”—Publishers Weekly
Praise for Jodi Picoult
“Picoult is a skilled wordsmith, and she beautifully creates situations that not only provoke the mind but touch the flawed souls in all of us.”—The Boston Globe
“Jodi Picoult is that rare, one-in-a-million writer whose books both squeeze your heart and expand your mind.”—Emily Henry
Praise for Jennifer Finney Boylan
“Jennifer Finney Boylan is an exquisite writer.”—Augusten Burroughs
“One could not ask for a wiser, warmer, more engaging companion than Jennifer Finney Boylan.”—Mary Roach
Chapter 1
Olivia 1
December 7, 2018
The day of
From the moment I knew I was having a baby, I wanted it to be a girl. I wandered the aisles of department stores, touching doll-size dresses and tiny sequined shoes. I pictured us with matching nail polish—me, who’d never had a manicure in my life. I imagined the day her fairy hair was long enough to capture in pigtails, her nose pressed to the glass of a school bus window; I saw her first crush, prom dress, heartbreak. Each vision was a bead on a rosary of future memories; I prayed daily.
As it turned out, I was not a zealot . . . only a martyr.
When I gave birth, and the doctor announced the baby’s sex, I did not believe it at first. I had done such a stellar job of convincing myself of what I wanted that I completely forgot what I needed. But when I held Asher, slippery as a minnow, I was relieved.
Better to have a boy, who would never be someone’s victim.
Most people in Adams, New Hampshire, know me by name, and those who don’t, know to steer clear of my home. It’s often that way for beekeepers—like firefighters, we willingly put ourselves into situations that are the stuff of others’ nightmares. Honeybees are far less vindictive than their yellow jacket cousins, but people can’t often tell the difference, so anything that stings and buzzes comes to be seen as a potential hazard. A few hundred yards past the antique Cape, my colonies form a semicircular rainbow of hives, and most of the spring and summer the bees zip between them and the acres of blossoms they pollinate, humming a warning.
I grew up on a small farm that had been in my father’s family for generations: an apple orchard that, in the fall, sold cider and donuts made by my mother and, in the summer, had pick-your-own strawberry fields. We were land-rich and cash-poor. My father was an apiarist by hobby, as was his father before him, and so on, all the way back to the first McAfee who was an original settler of Adams. It is just far enough away from the White Mountain National Forest to have affordable real estate. The town has one traffic light, one bar, one diner, a post office, a town green that used to be a communal sheep grazing area, and Slade Brook—a creek whose name was misprinted in a 1789 geological survey map, but which stuck. Slate Brook, as it should have been written, was named for the eponymous rock mined from its banks, which was shipped far and wide to become tombstones. Slade was the surname of the local undertaker and village drunk, who had a tendency to wander off when he was on a bender, and who ironically killed himself by drowning in six inches of water in the creek.
When I first brought Braden to meet my parents, I told him that story. He had been driving at the time; his grin flashed like lightning. But who, he’d asked, buried the undertaker?
Back then, we had been living outside of DC, where Braden was a resident in cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins and I worked at the National Zoo, trying to cobble together enough money for a graduate program in zoology. We’d only been together three months, but I had already moved in with him. We were visiting my parents that weekend because I knew, viscerally, that Braden Fields was the one.
On that first trip back home, I had been so sure of what my future would hold. I was wrong on all counts. I never expected to be an apiarist like my father; I never thought I’d wind up sleeping in my childhood bedroom once again as an adult; I never imagined I’d settle down on a farm my older brother, Jordan, and I once could not wait to leave. I married Braden; he got a fellowship at Mass General; we moved to Boston; I was a doctor’s wife. Then, almost a year to the day of my wedding anniversary, my father didn’t come home one evening after checking his hives. My mother found him, dead of a heart attack in the tall grass, bees haloing his head.
My mother sold the piece of land that held our apple orchard to a couple from Brooklyn. She kept the strawberry fields but was thoroughly at a loss when it came to my father’s hives. Since my brother was busy with a high-powered legal career and my mother was allergic to bees, the apiary fell to me. For five years, I drove from Boston to Adams every week to take care of the colonies. After Asher was born, I’d bring him with me, leaving him in the company of my mother while I checked the hives. I fell in love with beekeeping, the slow-motion flow of pulling a frame out of a hive, the Where’s Waldo? search for the queen. I expanded from five colonies to fifteen. I experimented with bee genetics with colonies from Russia, from Slovenia, from Italy. I signed pollination contracts with the Brooklynites and three other local fruit orchards, setting up new hives on their premises. I harvested, processed, and sold honey and beeswax products at farmers’ markets from the Canadian border to the suburbs of Massachusetts. I became, almost by accident, the first commercially successful beekeeper in the history of apiarist McAfees. By the time Asher and I moved permanently to Adams, I knew I might never get rich doing this, but I could make a living.
My father taught me that beekeeping is both a burden and a privilege. You don’t bother the bees unless they need your help, and you help them when they need it. It’s a feudal relationship: protection in return for a percentage of the fruits of their labors.
He taught me that if a body is easily crushed, it develops a weapon to prevent that from happening.
He taught me that sudden movements get you stung.
I took these lessons a bit too much to heart.
On the day of my father’s funeral, and years later, on the day of my mother’s, I told the bees. It’s an old tradition to inform them of a death in the family; if a beekeeper dies, and the bees aren’t asked to stay on with their new master, they’ll leave. In New Hampshire, the custom is to sing, and the news has to rhyme. So I draped each colony with black crepe, knocked softly, crooned the truth. My beekeeping net became a funeral veil. The hive might well have been a coffin.
By the time I come downstairs that morning, Asher is in the kitchen. We have a deal, whoever gets up first makes the coffee. My mug still has a wisp of steam rising. He is shoveling cereal into his mouth, absorbed in his phone.
“Morning,” I say, and he grunts in response.
For a moment, I let myself stare at him. It’s hard to believe that the soft-centered little boy who would cry when his hands got sticky with propolis from the hives can now lift a super full of forty pounds of honey as if it weighs no more than his hockey stick. Asher is over six feet tall, but even as he was growing, he was never ungainly. He moves with the kind of grace you find in wildcats, the ones that can steal away a kitten or a chick before you even realize they’ve gone. Asher has my blond hair and the same ghost-green eyes, for which I have always been grateful. He carries his father’s last name, but if I also had to see Braden every time I looked at my son, it would be that much harder.
I catalog the breadth of his shoulders, the damp curls at the nape of his neck; the way the tendons in his forearms shift and play as he scrolls through his texts. It’s shocking, sometimes, to be confronted with this when a second ago he sat on my shoulders, trying to pull down a star and unravel a thread of the night.
“No practice this morning?” I ask, taking a sip of my coffee. Asher has been playing hockey as long as we’ve lived here; he skates as effortlessly as he walks. He was made captain as a junior and reelected this year, as a senior. I never can remember whether they have rink time before school or after, as it changes daily.
His lips tug with a slight smile, and he types a response into his phone, but doesn’t answer.
“Hello?” I say. I slip a piece of bread into the ancient toaster, which is jerry-rigged with duct tape that occasionally catches on fire. Breakfast for me is always toast and honey, never in short supply.
“I guess you have practice later,” I try, and then provide the answer that Asher doesn’t. “Why yes, Mom, thanks for taking such an active interest in my life.”
I fold my arms across my boxy cable-knit sweater. “Am I too old to wear this tube top?” I ask lightly.
Silence.
“I’m sorry I won’t be here for dinner, but I’m running away with a cult.”
I narrow my eyes. “I posted that naked photo of you as a toddler on Instagram for Throwback Thursday.”
Asher grunts noncommittally. My toast pops up; I spread it with honey and slide into the chair directly across from Asher. “I’d really prefer that you not use my Mastercard to pay for your Pornhub subscription.”
His eyes snap to mine so fast I think I can hear his neck crack. “What?”
“Oh, hey,” I say smoothly. “Nice to have your attention.”
Asher shakes his head, but he puts down his phone. “I didn’t use your Mastercard,” he says.
“I know.”
“I used your Amex.”
I burst out laughing.
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Jodi Picoult
Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-eight novels, including Wish You Were Here, The Book of Two Ways, A Spark of Light, Small Great Things, Leaving Time, and My Sister's Keeper, and, with daughter Samantha van Leer, two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page. Picoult lives in New Hampshire.
Her next novel, Mad Honey, co-written with Jennifer Finney Boylan, is available on October 11th.
Follow Jodi Picoult on Intagram, Twitter, and Facebook: @jodipicoult
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Customer reviews
4.4 out of 5
58,691 global ratings
Bibliomaniac
5
The authors should be credited "Jennifer Finney Boylan with Jodi Picoult"
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2024
Verified Purchase
I tend to have a love/hate relationship with Jodi Picoult books. I live her stories, hate her endings. And I really hate that that's the first thing that comes to mind in reviewing this book.
It is an amazing book. The absolute best thing I can say about Picoult is that she doesn't write the same book over and over. She tackles new topics in every book of hers that I've read, and I've read most of them. Sometimes I forget who I'm reading because every book is so different. I think even the writing style is unique to each story.
But enough about Jodi, Jennifer, I'm sorry. It's your story, literally your dream child, and Jodi gets top billing on everything, even in this review. But one thing she gets absolutely right is that she couldn't have told this story without you because it isn't her story to tell. I think this is my introduction to you and I will be reading much more. I'm also sorry you didn't win the Detective Mike argument. Lol And I am curious who's idea was the ending, the reveal of the culprit, so to speak. I blamed it on your coauthor because whack endings are the one thing that you can count on in a Picoult book but not having read you before, I admit I could be wrong.
Regardless it's an amazing book. To get 5* from me a book has to make me laugh and cry. And oh it did just that. I also have to have someone to root for. I loved almost all the characters and realistically every book has to have an antagonist or two, so the characters were perfect. I also should relate to it in some way no matter how small. There was a lot that could be pulled from my own story both as a child and as a mother.
For some of my book club friends, to get five stars, they require a book to be something that everyone should read. Something that everyone can get something from. I haven't looked yet to see how they rated it but for me, this is one of those books. I think we live in a time when being trans or enby or anywhere in the LGBTQ+ spectrum has so much more acceptance than ever before and at the same time so much more opposition. The more acceptance anything other than the "traditional male/female sex assignment" gets, the more those that think it's truth need to fight to maintain their status quo. The strongest purpose of fiction is empathy. It's to allow ourselves to walk around in another person's shoes and find out how our preconceived notions are wrong and how they inhibit other people. Obviously if every person in the world read this book, many would identify more with Braden, or Lily's father, or Dirk and completely miss the point. One of the book club questions is, can someone like them change. It's not easy, but I have seen it happen. The reason there is more acceptance of differing genders is because people can change. But there are also people in this world like Olivia who just don't have a cl inue until they have the first conversation, until the first time they walk around in those shoes. So I do think everyone should try all these various shoes on for size.
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27 people found this helpful
Natasha D. Newman
5
Exceptional
Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2024
Verified Purchase
The book contained moments of laughter, sadness, realization, and self-reflection of one’s own beliefs. Mystery, love, empowerment and bee facts, a reader can’t ask for more in a novel.
CC
5
loved it
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2024
Verified Purchase
This book is a wonderful mix of wonderful storytelling, engaging characters, and thoughtfully presented information. It is smart and still a page turner.
4.2
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