Honey: A Novel

Fictionalizes a pop singer's rise to fame. Amber Young is "discovered" but goes on audition after audition, loses on StarSearch, and has a mom who's ready to throw in the towel on the whole acting/singing career. The way she eventually makes it into the industry is less interesting than all that comes after: the friendship, the boys, the music, the tours. Amber was easy to root for, and I enjoyed the narration by Brittany Pressley.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for an advance listener copy of Honey. In 1997 Amber gets a call that she’s been selected to be a part of the girl group Cloud9 - a rare and incredible opportunity to get her mother’s financial situation under control and also make a name for herself. She finds herself in LA amongst the up-and-coming teens of pop music, a singer/dancer named Gwen and Wes, a member of the biggest boy band around. As Amber’s ambitions grow, she branches off to do a solo act and her fame skyrockets, bringing with it a world of people she can’t trust, who don’t have her best interest at heart, and who may be more interested in seeing her fall instead of fly. Every time I revisit this book on Goodreads or Amazon, I’m shocked at the low rating. This was an absolute 5 star stunner for me. It had me in a variety of feels and took me back to what people often refer to as a ‘simpler time’ which is really anything but in retrospect. Perhaps more than anything, this book was a ‘you had to be there’ book. The late 90s were such a hard time to be a pre-teen/teenage girl, sex was selling & everyone who was out there seemed to be living their best life, It was such a weird moment in time and I can see why people who didn’t experience it firsthand wouldn’t relate as much as I did. I thought that Isabel Banta perfectly Amber and her internal struggles of wanting to do things for herself, wondering if she was trying too hard to impress people but also wanting to impress people, wanting to be her own person without judgment but being scared of what they’d think if she was. Being a teenager is freaking. hard. We don’t give teens enough credit for the stuff that they have to go through. This book definitely had me reflecting on not only my own experiences as a teenager, but also those stars of the times like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and Paris Hilton. The added pressure of the spotlight and the behind-the-scenes influence from peers, parents, or other people they trusted to guide them but ended up leading them astray at times. I could probably go on and on about the nostalgic aspect and my internal reflections but in honesty, all I need to say is that this is book is an absolute must read if you grew up in that pop explosion, right before the internet ruled the world, when we would run home to catch TRL and record our favorite music videos (on VHS!), and then call our BFFs on landlines to gush about how cute this one is and how we wish we had the body of that one. And lastly - HOW IS A BOOK SET IN 1997 CONSIDERED HISTORICAL FICTION?! HOW DID WE GET HERE?!