Mad Honey

Mad Honey is Jodi Picoult's 2022 novel, the New York Times bestseller co-authored with Jennifer Finney Boylan (the canonical contemporary American transgender memoirist behind She's Not There) and the structural collaboration that brought a much larger audience to Boylan's literary work. The structural premise is Olivia McAfee, a New Hampshire beekeeper raising her teenage son Asher alone after fleeing an abusive marriage; when Asher's girlfriend Lily Campanello is found dead at her own home, the novel runs the murder investigation, the eventual trial, and the back-half reveals about both Asher's possible inheritance of his father's violence and Lily's own history. The novel alternates Olivia's first-person chapters with Lily's posthumous first-person reverse-chronological chapters that begin at the day of her death and move backward through her life across the rest of the book.

Picoult and Boylan's structural method is the patient dual-narration with the reverse-chronological Lily thread doing the structural work the rest of the contemporary American literary-thriller market has been trying to figure out. The beekeeping procedural texture (the operational mechanics of running a small New Hampshire honey operation, the specific seasonal cycles, the actual mad-honey phenomenon that gives the novel its title) is rendered with the kind of patient research-backed specificity Picoult's career has been built on. The Lily reverse-narration is the structural achievement and the part that justifies the co-author collaboration; Boylan's contribution to the Lily chapters produces a sustained transgender adolescent first-person voice that contemporary American literary fiction has not historically committed to at this level. The trial chapters in the back half are handled with reasonable moral seriousness.

Recommended for literary commercial readers, for the broader Picoult and Boylan audiences, and as the right contemporary co-authored literary-thriller for readers who want both authors at once. Compare to Small Great Things (Picoult, 2016), She's Not There (Boylan, 2003 memoir), and the broader contemporary American literary-thriller shelf. The Carrie Coon and Jennifer Finney Boylan dual-narrator audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.