Mad Honey: A GMA Book Club Pick

About Mad Honey

Olivia McAfee left Boston with her teenage son Asher after her marriage turned dangerous. She\u2019s taken up beekeeping in a small New Hampshire town; Asher has started to find his footing. Then Lily Campanello moves to town, and Asher falls for her\u2014carefully, genuinely, the way that feels different from anything before. When Lily is found dead and the circumstances point toward someone she knew, the investigation pulls both families apart.

Mad Honey is a collaboration between Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, told in alternating voices: Lily\u2019s chapters reach backward in time from before her death; Asher\u2019s move forward through the aftermath. Lily is a transgender girl, and the novel portrays her experience with specificity and care\u2014drawing on Boylan\u2019s own life as a transgender woman and author. Lily\u2019s identity is not a plot device or a source of mystery. It is simply who she is, rendered fully and without apology.

Published in 2022, the novel is also about domestic violence and the way its damage travels across generations. Olivia’s escape from her marriage and her complicated, protective relationship with Asher runs parallel to what Lily’s family is learning about the life she was living before she died. Both families are carrying secrets that have cost them, and the silences between parents and children are the novel’s real terrain.

Beekeeping, Silence, and the Cost of Hiding

The beekeeping material woven throughout is substantive, not decorative. Olivia’s observations about colony behavior—the way hives function, what happens when a colony is stressed, the biology of queens and workers—serve as a structural parallel for both families. A hive depends on information flowing freely through the colony. Secrets, the novel argues, work like pesticides: they disrupt the whole system from the inside.

Lily and Asher’s relationship is tender and specific—two teenagers learning to trust someone outside their immediate family while each carrying wounds they haven’t fully named yet. The novel earns its emotional weight through those particular details rather than through melodrama. The mystery of what happened to Lily is not the point. The point is what was happening to her all along, in plain sight.

Why Mad Honey Has Been Challenged

Mad Honey has been challenged in 1 state and 1 district tracked in this catalog. The challenges focus primarily on Lily’s identity as a transgender girl and the novel’s positive, detailed portrayal of her experience. The book’s treatment of domestic violence and a teenager’s death are also cited. Both Picoult and Boylan have spoken publicly about the book’s importance in direct response to those challenges—the families who have sought it out are often the ones who most need to see their lives reflected in a story that doesn’t look away.