I am finding that Mad Honey is a maddeningly difficult book to review without spoiling it.

The story revolves around three teenagers going to high school in a small town in New Hampshire. Asher is a star athlete who plays varsity hockey. He is raised by Olivia, a single mom who escaped her abusive husband when he was starting to harm Asher when he was just six years old. Oliva is a beekeeper. She raises bees, rents them out to orchards and farms for pollination, and sells honey at the local markets. Lily is a bright girl and a cello player, very pretty and popular in her school, even though she is new. All the boys have their eyes on her. Her mom is Ava, a park ranger with a passion for nature and who has hiked the Appalachian Trail. Ava is also a single mom to Lily. She too left an abusive husband to protect Lily. Asher’s best childhood friend is Maya, a precocious girl who has grown up with Asher as a buddy, but there was never any romantic relationship. She and Lily have become best friends. Maya has two moms, a lesbian couple.

Mad Honey is narrated in alternating chapters by Olivia, Asher’s mom, and Lily, the teenage daughter of Ava. It tells the story from Oliva’s adult point of view, pretty much in the present tense, and from Lily, the young girl’s point of view, mostly in the form of flashbacks. This makes for a complex plotline and occasional confusion, particularly when trying to align the chronology.

In the first third of the book I was slightly confused and possibly even bored. I am not necessarily very interested in teenage romance. Olivia’s lessons on beekeeping provide a fresh framework for the story outline, but I had trouble connecting the details about the bees, and the title including honey, with the teenage love and associated heartaches.

All the main characters, and even the peripheral ones, are multi-dimensional and well-crafted. They come alive and are real people to the reader.

What I have told you so far is all I can tell you. It does not sound like much of a story you’d be interested in reading, but be assured, there is much, much more.

Mad Honey seems like a book about the birds and the bees and teenagers in love, but there are massive, almost mind-boggling plot twists that appear out of nowhere that make this story worth reading. Mad Honey is not about birds and bees, it’s about something altogether different, and I am not going to tell you what that is.

The book itself, as a novel, is so-so. I would have given it about 2 stars in my rating system of 4. Since it provoked my thinking significantly and educated me about a subject I had dismissed as unimportant all my life, I had to bump the rating to 3 stars.

Mad Honey is definitely a novel everyone in 2024 should read.

Spoiler Alert

Do not read beyond this unless you are okay with spoilers or you have already read the book.

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Out of nowhere, about halfway through the story, it is revealed that Lily is transgender. She grew up knowing she was a girl, trapped in a boy’s body. Mad Honey is about the highly complex problem of transgender issues in our current society, and it illustrates the topic from the point of view of a transgender person, Lily.

I have never much occupied myself with trans rights, or issues surrounding transgender people. I remember when I was a boy in Germany, there was an old woman who we often saw walking the streets of our city. She was conservatively dressed in women’s clothes, carried a purse, and everyone in the city knew her. We knew her, recognized her and secretly made fun of her because she appeared to be a man, wearing women’s clothes. She had the body of a man, the hard features of a man’s face, stubble and an Adam’s apple. She wore longish hair, which always looked like she had cut herself. This was in the 1960s, and she probably didn’t find a barber who was willing to help her.  As kids, we just didn’t know what to do with “her.”  That was my only exposure to trans people, or even possibly just cross-dressers. I always thought it was a very minor problem, with very, very few individuals affected.

In our current political climate in the US in the 2020s, the matter of LGBTQ people, which I presume includes transgender people, we learn that there are many more of them than I ever realized. I actually personally know at least one (the son/daughter of a friend), I have heard of another one (the son/non-binary of another friend), and of course there are the highly visible examples, the most famous one probably being Caitlyn Jenner.

While I had the attitude of disregarding the existence of transgender people for most of my life, considering them a minority of a minority, it never really occurred to me to think much about them and what life might be like walking in their shoes. In America, we have national debates about what locker rooms and bathrooms we should allow them to use. Some states are restricting their access to health care. Some states prosecute doctors who are willing and able to help them.

Just because we happen to not have their problems or challenges, we tend to arrange our world so we can trample on their rights as humans, as citizens and as people. We rationalize that they should just fall in line. We, the majority, have the audacity to box them into our own limited worldview based on the privilege drawn out of the bodies we were randomly born into.

Per the authors of Mad Honey, during the year it took them to write this book, over 350 transgender people were killed around the world, more than a fifth of them inside their own homes.

Reading Mad Honey brought all these issues to the forefront of my awareness, and it may have shaped my thinking into directions I had not considered before. A very worthwhile read indeed.