HONEY

A turn-of-the-millennium pop star recounts her disillusioning journey to the top of the charts in this self-assured debut.

In 1990 New Jersey, 10-year-old Amber Young sings Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart” at a local talent show, not realizing an agent is in the audience—or that this performance will direct the trajectory of her life. She lands a spot in the girl group Cloud9, where she befriends Gwen Morris, who soon goes solo and convinces Amber she’s good enough to do the same. Separately, the two achieve quick success, and their friendship continues via voicemails sent from recording studios and tour buses around the world. Both Amber’s intimate first-person narration and Gwen’s messages reveal a worrisome loss of autonomy, their bodies becoming hypersexualized vehicles for others’ desires, power plays, and entertainment. When Amber starts touring with massively famous boy band ETA, she grows close to one of the guys, Wes Kingston, despite knowing the media is desperate to see him with Gwen. This won’t end well, which we know from the get-go; the book opens with a flash from 2002, when Amber is on the cover of Rolling Stone talking about her role in a scandalous Wes and Gwen breakup. Amber’s fame comes quickly and easily, so the tension isn’t in her pursuit of it but rather in anticipation of its consequences. Readers who lived through the Britney vs. Christina TRL era will likely feel an ambivalence similar to Amber’s own. The pop craze was fun, but at what cost? It’s never quite clear how Amber feels about the music of it all: She says singing allows her to “understand the purpose of gods,” but it takes up so little space on the page it’s easy to forget that’s what she’s famous for. Then again, maybe that confusion is the point. While memoirs from former teen stars are starting to expose behind-the-scenes exploitation and abuse, this fictionalization brings readers close through the kind of rich, immersive worldbuilding and gut-punch depth of feeling that only a masterful novelist can provide.

A provocative, quietly foreboding examination of the teen idol industrial machine, arriving at the perfect cultural moment.