The first one wasn’t meant to be fatal. The second was maybe an accident. The deaths that happened after that were murders, though Yrsa is very determined to dress up her “activities” in academic rationalization in Imani Thompson’s disturbing novel, Honey. As Yrsa chips away at her thesis and raises her body count, she argues about justice and Afro-pessimism and the inevitability of violence. In the end, however, I have to wonder if Yrsa really just wants to kill people.
There’s something unsettled—and unsettling—about Yrsa when we first meet her. While she teaches and works on a PhD at Cambridge University, the rest of her time is spent having sex, drinking, and avoiding her mother. On their own, there’s nothing that unusual about her non-academic activities. Why not enjoy life while you’re young? But after a few late, sweaty, boozy nights, it started to become clear to me that Yrsa was looking for something to ground her. She’s always running to the next thing, never thinking too hard about what keeps her from letting her relationships deepen into more than sex or what she might do after she finishes her thesis.
At least, that’s how Yrsa read to me until a friendly acquaintance tells Yrsa that not only is she having an unhappy affair with a much older, married professor, but that professor is also stealing this friend’s academic work for a forthcoming book. Yrsa burns at the injustice of it, but what really sets Yrsa afire is the fact that this sort-of-friend isn’t going to do anything about what the professor did. This professor is just the first man to catch Yrsa’s nascent sense of vigilantism. Before long, Yrsa finds other targets for her anger and outrage. With a bit of luck and a bit of planning, Yrsa finds that she has no problem ushering these men out of this world.
Yrsa never really stops to think about her transformation into judge and executioner. She never questions whether or not the men she selects deserve to die for their “crimes,” until a massive twist at the end of the book forces Yrsa to finally confront whether or not she’s right. I was fascinated by Thompson’s version of a villain who is convinced that only they can see things clearly and only they can set things right, even if everyone else would immediately hightail it to the police once they learned what Yrsa was up to. Readers who enjoy exploring ethics and law will find a lot to think about in Honey.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.