Honey

April 8, 2024
Banta debuts with a sweeping if surprisingly dreary ode to the pop princesses of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Amber Young is just 10 when she’s first scouted by agent Angela Newton at a 1990 New Jersey talent show. Two years later, she signs on with Angela and they set out in pursuit of stardom, though Amber consistently feels like she’s falling short of her rivals, beginning with a disappointing appearance on Star Search. As the years pass, she puts out hit records and music videos, but she’s repeatedly compared unfavorably to her industry peers, accused of being too overtly sexual in contrast to performers with a girl next door image. Her best friend, Gwen, is one of those seemingly wholesome pop stars, but Angela knows there’s more below the surface of Gwen’s story. Their friendship gets complicated when Amber disrupts Gwen’s made-for-PR romance by sleeping with her heartthrob boyfriend. Interviews, song lyrics, and liner notes punctuate Amber’s first-person narration, which chronicles the singer’s efforts to break free of her industry-created sexpot image and start writing her own music. Although the behind-the-scenes friendship between Amber and Gwen has moments of resonance, their conflicts lack believable drama, and the romantic relationships are missing emotional credibility and genuine heat. Like much of the pop music at its center, Banta’s novel is long on style but short on depth.

June 1, 2024
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.

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May 1, 2024

DEBUT Nineties pop-princess nostalgia drips like honey in Banta's debut novel. Amber Young auditions for a talent agent at age 10, competes as a Star Search junior vocalist, and joins a new girl group at 17. She longs to be truly heard and for "specific people to listen" as she works to balance her rising popularity, the ups and downs of fame, and public scandal. The music industry and the media both pit Amber against super-talent Gwen Morris and sweetheart Savannah Sinclair while painting her as a rebellious sexpot bad girl. Banta's novel aptly tackles the sexualization of women and girls in the media, body image, and disordered eating in creating a protagonist who hungers for love and starves for attention, praise, and, literally, food. An ode to the pop superstars of the late 1990s and early 2000s, this novel features an apropos Britney Spears song lyric in the front matter. Headlines, interviews, song lyrics, and liner notes are pointedly woven throughout the narrative. VERDICT While the novel's plot points are at times predictable and lack the high drama required for a celebrity storyline, fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid and Brandy Colbert will enjoy.--Alicia Rogers

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 16, 2024
Amber Young has singing talent in Banta's debut novel, which follows Amber's youthful aspirations and rise to pop star status in the late nineties and early aughts. Though Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera are never mentioned by name, Amber's story yet rises from their famous shadows, seeking to give complexity and nuance to women flatlined by success, producers, and media of the era. Friendship, performance, and family dynamics are themes, yet Honey pays significant attention to sex and dating, which may undermine its goal. But It also revels in the fascinating and disturbing mechanisms at work in the establishment of pop-superstardom. Banta cleverly blends Wikipedia-like entries, song lyrics, and magazine articles with the chapters, which are arranged along a song's progression. Readers will enjoy Amber's humanity, her mistakes and attempts to fix them, and empathize with what she has to navigate without support from either parent. Easily read in a sitting or two, Banta's novel is fun, nostalgic, and enlightening.

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