Honey

Melody Bishop is the fifth-grader protagonist of Honey. Melody is a tomboy with short hair, who “wore jeans in the winter and cutoffs in the summer, sneakers year-round, and on top, either a T-shirt or one of her father’s old button-down shirts, untucked with the sleeves rolled up” (3). Melody has a wide vocabulary for her age because her father is a high school humanities teacher. Melody is very close with her father, having lost her mother at birth, which is why when her father begins acting strangely, Melody picks up on it right away.

The novel primarily follows Melody as she seeks answers to the novel’s two main mysteries: who her father’s girlfriend is and what her mother was like. Melody doesn’t know much about her mother because it’s too painful for her father to talk about her. Initially, Melody doesn’t have strong feelings about her missing mother, so “[i]t was not a particularly sensitive subject” (4). However, when Melody meets her mother’s best childhood friend, Bee-Bee Churchill, Bee-Bee begins to fill Melody in on details about her mother. Melody feels “something was stirring, a feeling she couldn’t quite find the right words to describe” (91), and after hearing about her mother’s funeral, “the mysterious feeling got stronger” (92).