She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. This debut speaks to the girl inside all of us who wants to be perfect, and-through bare-knuckled grit and hard-won perspective-realizes that, flaws and all, she is.

Honey Girl is about the journey of growing up, the importance of prioritizing mental health, and the beauty of found family. It’s these moments of stark self-awareness, combined with Roger’s visual and emotive storytelling, that provide the oomph in this story, and its most heartfelt throughline: that life doesn’t always go to plan, and that’s okay. But when Grace gets drunk, marries a girl she just met, and doesn’t get the job for which she’d been recommended, she registers that she needs to take space to breathe and pick herself back up. With her PhD finally in hand, it’s time for all that hard work to pay off-just like she’d planned. Queer and Black in a world that expects her to be twice as good as everyone else just to get by, Grace has never had a lazy day in her life.

And while Honey Girl lured us in with the powerhouse writing and an addictive married-in-Vegas trope, it was the story of Grace Porter tumbling into adulthood and learning to find herself that kept us turning the page. Evocative, playful, inventive-this debut novel sings. When you crack open Morgan Roger’s Honey Girl, the first thing you’ll notice is the power of her voice.

Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers