Honey

The idea of the nuclear family, with a mother, a father, and their biological children, is a central concept in Western culture. Families like this take center stage in American popular culture, from family-centered literature to sitcoms and movies. Sarah Weeks’s work challenges the status quo of stories about the nuclear family to tell the stories of families that do not fit into the rigid nuclear box. Instead, Weeks’s novels feature less-common family dynamics and the questions and conflicts that arise from them. 

So B. It’s protagonist goes on a journey to seek answers about where she and her mother, who has an intellectual disability, came from. As Simple as It Seems follows a protagonist living with fetal alcohol syndrome and adopted parents, seeking answers to her biological past and questioning her own identity. Jumping the Scratch follows a protagonist recovering from trauma caused earlier in his childhood, seeking answers for himself and his aunt, whose memory is skipping. These novels handle tragedy and resilience in a way that is accessible for young readers. Weeks’s novels also have a common thread of mystery and self-discovery: As Weeks’s young protagonists seek answers to the overarching mysteries, they also find answers about who they are as people and what they want from the world.

Honey and its sibling novel Pie explore similar themes, but they are geared toward a younger, middle-grade audience. Pie, which was published several years before Honey, follows Alice, a young girl who is dealing with the death of her aunt, and her newfound responsibility as the owner of her aunt’s cat, Lardo. Her aunt, famous for her pies, left her pie recipe to Lardo, but the recipe’s location is a mystery. Alice must track it down while working through grief over her aunt. Pie’s cover art features a cat against a blue background, looking up at a pie.

Honey features a mirror version of Pie’s cover art, only with a bulldog against a yellow background instead of a cat, and a dripping honey dipper instead of a pie. Honey focuses on the Bishop family, which consists only of protagonist Melody and her father. Melody’s mother died during childbirth, and Melody must navigate life without knowledge of her mother’s legacy because it’s too painful for her father to discuss. Parallel to Alice, Melody works to both solve a mystery and deal with her grief as the main conflict of the novel. Melody, like Weeks’s other protagonists, has a non-traditional family structure, and the conflicts she faces within the novel—learning who her mother was, and worrying about who her father is dating—have everything to do with this family structure.