![]() Her father’s business is quickly taken out of her hands and barely mentioned for the rest of the novel. He is her trophy, not her boyfriend, and far too much of the plot is dedicated Nani’s efforts to achieve beach stardom with him on her arm. Her dad is quickly put on the backburner while she does her best to catch a shallow surfer boyfriend, a born-again Christian whose description revolves around the number of abs tracking down his torso. But all of this happens in a dreamy haze, divorced from real life and emotional complexity. ![]() Nani wants a lot of things: she wants to be in with the cool girls, she wants a boyfriend, she wants a girlfriend, she wants to mourn her father in a way appropriate to her culture, she wants to run her father’s business. The primary problem that I had was with the lack of a true driving plot. It could have been a much tighter novel than it became. There is a lot of potential in Honey Girl: the setting is richly painted and realistic the characters are flawed and human the style of writing is immersive and confident. ![]() What I actually got was a Mean Girls story with recreational drug use and string bikinis. A bisexual mixed-race girl exploring her identity and blasting through barriers to win her dreams. An underdog story: a challenge against the 1970s status quo. ![]() ![]() Before I read Honey Girl I was visualising it as the story of a Hawaiian surfer girl joining a gang and fighting to legitimise herself as a great female surfer. ![]()
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