Honey by Isabel Banta
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Isabel Banta’s HONEY brings us back to those covers of YM and Seventeen when the age of teen pop stars sold us the music of Britney, Christina, and all the rest. In the story of her lead character Amber Young, Banta synthesizes so much about that era. The way adolescents were commodified and marketed. The way their sexuality was simultaneously manufactured, policed, begged for, and ruthlessly criticized. The ravenous fans, paparazzi, and executives all looking for their piece of the star. As her characters messily find their way into adulthood backstage, Banta affirms a message we never got to hear at the turn of the millennium: a woman’s body and all its expressions of desire are not the moral property of anyone but herself.
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