Honey by Isabel Banta

Book Blurb
It is 1997, and Amber Young has received a life-changing call. It’s a chance thousands of girls would die for: the opportunity to join girl group Cloud9 in Los Angeles and escape her small town. She quickly finds herself in the orbits of fellow rising stars Gwen Morris, a driven singer-dancer, and Wes Kingston, a member of the biggest boy band in the world, ETA.

As Amber embarks on her solo career and her fame intensifies, she increasingly finds herself reduced to a body, a voice, an object. Surrounded by the wrong kind of people and driven by a desire for recognition and success, for love and sex, for agency and connection, Amber comes of age at a time when the kaleidoscope of public opinion can distort everything, and one mistake can shatter a career.

My Review
Honey is a rip roaring journey through the 90’s and 2000’s pop world. A place where how you look matters, a place of young female talent that is controlled by middle aged men, and of boy bands where even their love lives are controlled by management. Isabel Banta follows the story of three young pop stars, from auditions to world tours, and what there lives are like as part of the pop factory.

Isabel Banta not only focuses on the female characters of Amber and Gwen, but also how young men were treated by telling Wes’s story. I really liked this balance, it showed that men were exploited, but a lot less than women. As usual the PR machine likes to put people in boxes, Gwen the innocent young women, whilst Amber is sold as a sex kitten, more raunchy than Gwen that sees her get hammered in some press as being overtly sexual and flaunting her body. As expected this isn’t a decision made by Amber but by her team. It was annoying, but probably true even today, that she was seen not as a person but a commodity, and her case a pair of boobs that men speak to rather than face. Control is a central part to this book, the record companies control every part of these artist’s lives, even down to fake love lives that are used as a popularity tool.

Isabel Banta has created three wonderfully drawn characters that bounce off each other bringing their individual stories to this book. I would say Amber is the main character, she has lived and dreamed this since her teens. I felt she was the most exploited due mainly to her developped body, whilst she wanted to be more than her sexuality. Being on constant PR tours, playing concerts all over the country and on the world’s stage leaves her lonely and it is fascinatig that her best friend is her said rival, Gwen. I loved their relationship, no one could know they were friends, but they are in a rare situation of being pop stars so understand each other, and give each other support and confidence to go for change.

By introducing Wes, Isabel Banta shows the opposite of Amber and Gwen’s story. Being part of a boy band means that he has a group of friends to share his experience, he never feels the isolation of Amber and Gwen. However, I did feel that he was maybe alone in a different way. He can’t be with the perosn he loves, his PR team want him to fake a romance with Gwen as it is good for their careers.

When reading this it did make me think of Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake, although this really isn’ their story. It was how the music industry pitted these women against each other, and how they developped from teenagers to young women wanting more control, but finding obstacles in their way.

Honey is a real escapist novel. I actually read it in one day and enjoyed immersing my self in the 90’s pop scene. There are obviously a lot of moral and controlling issues in relation to the characters, and post #MeToo we hope that things have changed and these young stars have more control over their lives. The writing captured the amosphere of this period and I loved the inclusion of some of the song lyrics, giving further insight into Amber’s life. This would make the perfect holiday read with its heady mix of sex, lust, power and rivalries. A sexy and sintillating read.

I would like to thank Zaffre Books and Tracy Fenton on Compulsive Readers for inviting me to be part of this blog tour in exchznge for my honest review.