Mad Honey
Jodi Picoult, 2022
Mystery, thriller & crime Contemporary fiction
A beekeeper, her hockey-captain son, and the charge that splits a small New Hampshire town — and everything a mother will not let herself see. A mother’s tenderness and a low hum of dread run through plain, close-up family scenes.
Feels like tenderness, dread and grief. About family, nature and society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy family drama braided with a small-town crime and close attention to beekeeping and nature. The dread and grief are steady, though, and the legal accusation keeps the middle tense rather than light.
Why read it
It puts a mother’s love and a town’s judgment under quiet pressure, with beekeeping details that make the tension feel tactile.
A page from the book
The vertigo of noticing, mid-breakfast, that your child is grown.
For a moment, I let myself stare at him. It’s hard to believe that the soft-centered little boy who would cry when his hands got sticky with propolis from the hives can now lift a super full of forty pounds of honey as if it weighs no more than his hockey stick. Asher is over six feet tall, but even as he was growing, he was never ungainly. He moves with the kind of grace you find in wildcats, the ones that can steal away a kitten or a chick before you even realize they’ve gone. Asher has my blond hair and the same ghost-green eyes, for which I have always been grateful. Jodi Picoult.The title names a real thing: honey from rhododendron nectar can be mildly toxic, and “mad honey” from Turkey's Black Sea coast has been recorded since antiquity.
Books that feel like this
More by Jodi Picoult
My Sister's Keeper
Jodi Picoult, 2007
An exploration of ethics and sacrifice when a family's life is determined by a biological lottery.
The Pact
Jodi Picoult, 1998
A small-town Maine novel about first love so certain it becomes dangerous, and the families who have to live with it.
The Storyteller
Jodi Picoult, 2013
Jodi Picoult braids a modern moral dilemma with a historical story of survival, asking who gets to tell—and be believed about—the past.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Mad Honey for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy family drama braided with a small-town crime and close attention to beekeeping and nature. The dread and grief are steady, though, and the legal accusation keeps the middle tense rather than light.
- What is Mad Honey like?
- A mother’s tenderness and a low hum of dread run through plain, close-up family scenes. Feels like tenderness, dread and grief. About family, nature and society.
- What should I read after Mad Honey?
- If you liked Mad Honey, try The Great Alone (Kristin Hannah), The Road (Cormac McCarthy) and Then She Was Gone (Lisa Jewell).
A taste of the feed
The child who keeps the whole family from tipping over, and knows it.
Leni was afraid to stay and afraid to leave. It was strange—stupid, even—but she often felt like the only adult in her family, as if she were the ballast that kept the creaky Allbright boat on an even keel. Mama was engaged in a continual quest to “find” herself. In the past few years, she’d tried EST and the human potential movement, spiritual training, Unitarianism. Even Buddhism. She’d cycled through them all, cherry-picked pieces and bits. Mostly, Leni thought, Mama had come away with T-shirts and sayings. Things like, What is, is, and what isn’t, isn’t. None of it seemed to amount to much.
The Great Alone · Kristin Hannah
What it looks like to see the warning signs only afterward.
But one wrong move, one tiny kink in the time line, it was all over. Not just their love story, but all of it. Youth. Life. Ellie Mack. All gone. All gone forever. If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along. But back then, when she knew nothing about anything, she had not seen it coming. She had walked straight into it with her eyes open.
Then She Was Gone · Lisa Jewell
The word you only get to say to one person.
I’m trying to say Mom as many times as I possibly can because I know I’ll never call another person that again. It’s reserved only for her. There is no replacement.
Home Is Where the Bodies Are · Jeneva Rose
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