👀 First impressions:
I had been circling this one for weeks before I finally picked it up. Honey is Imani Thompson’s debut, and it arrived carrying the kind of hype that usually makes me suspicious. Nearly every outlet with a books page named it one of the most anticipated novels of the year, and the premise alone explains why: a bored Cambridge PhD student accidentally kills a man, discovers she rather likes how it feels, and decides that ridding the world of bad men might be the most meaningful work she has ever done.
Thompson is a British writer of Jamaican heritage who studied sociology at Cambridge and wrote this while working as a bookseller at Daunt Books, which is such a perfect origin story that I almost resented it. Genre wise, it sits in an odd and interesting spot. It is a thriller, but it is also a campus novel, and underneath both of those it is a satire about race, class, gender and the stories we tell ourselves to make our worst impulses feel principled.
What drew me in was the promise of a protagonist I would not be able to sit comfortably with. I wanted to be unsettled. I was not disappointed.
✅ What I Liked:
The voice. Honestly, the voice does most of the heavy lifting here and it is more than up to the job. Yrsa narrates with this dry, exhausted, very funny detachment that makes even the grimmest moments land like a joke you feel guilty for laughing at. Thompson has an ear for the specific texture of academic life, the passive aggression in an email, the performance of a seminar room, the particular loneliness of being the only Black woman in a department that congratulates itself constantly on how progressive it is. That environment is rendered so precisely that it becomes a character in its own right.
The first death is a small masterpiece of writing. It is almost absurd in its execution, involving a bee and a bottle of San Pellegrino, and it happens with a casualness that completely resets your expectations for the book. There is no long agonised buildup. It simply occurs, and then Yrsa has to live inside the aftermath, and the aftermath is where Thompson is genuinely brilliant. The novel is far more interested in what killing does to Yrsa’s sense of herself than in whether she will be caught.
I also appreciated that this is not a mystery. You watch her plan. You watch her rationalise. The tension comes from wondering how far she will go and where the seams will start to show, and that is a much more uncomfortable place to sit than a whodunnit. Thompson keeps the pacing tight throughout, and the academic material she folds in, the feminist theory and the reading on racial violence, never feels like homework. It feels like the scaffolding Yrsa is building around her own behaviour, which is the point.
And the humour. I keep coming back to it. This book is much funnier than a book about serial murder has any right to be.
❎ What I didn’t Like:
The escalation is relentless, and while that is clearly a deliberate choice, there were stretches in the middle where I wanted the novel to slow down and breathe. Each event tumbles into the next at such speed that a few of the deaths start to feel interchangeable, and I lost some of the moral vertigo I had felt so sharply in the opening chapters. A little more stillness would have made the later kills hit harder.
I also found the supporting cast thinner than I wanted. Yrsa is so vividly drawn that the people around her, particularly the men, sometimes function more as arguments than as characters. That works when the satire is running hot, but it occasionally undercuts the novel’s own thesis. If the men are barely people, the question of whether they deserved what happened becomes easier to answer than it should be, and this is a book that is at its best when the answer is difficult.
The ending will divide readers. I will not spoil it, but I finished the last page, sat there for a minute, and could not decide whether I had been given a resolution or a shrug. I have come round to it since. On the night, I was frustrated.
📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you loved Promising Young Woman, you should read this immediately. It has the same combination of stylish rage and moral queasiness, and the same refusal to let you feel clean about enjoying it.
More broadly, this is for readers who like their thrillers with a literary spine. If you enjoy morally grey women who are not being quietly redeemed in the background, if Ottessa Moshfegh’s unpleasant narrators appeal to you, if you liked the sharpness of My Sister, the Serial Killer or the academic knife work of Yellowface, you will find a lot to chew on here. Campus novel fans should pick it up too, because the satire of university life is genuinely excellent even when the bodies are not dropping.
It is also, and I mean this as high praise, a fantastic book club pick. I finished it desperate to argue with someone about it.
💭 Final Thoughts:
Honey is a debut that swings hard and connects far more often than it misses. Thompson has written something slippery and provocative that uses a lurid premise to ask serious questions about who gets to claim justice and how easily a political principle can become a personal appetite. It is not a flawless novel. The middle rushes, some characters stay flat, and the ending asks for more generosity than I initially wanted to give it. But it is alive on every page in a way that a lot of tidier books are not, and I would take this over tidy any day.
I read it in two sittings and I have thought about it most days since. That is usually the only review metric that matters to me.
Final Rating ★★★★ – Wickedly funny, morally slippery, and impossible to put down
About the Reviewer
Minnie
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Book lover, chronic over-reader, and firm believer that the best stories are the ones that leave a mark. I review fiction across all genres with a soft spot for anything character-driven and emotionally complex. Want to know more? Head over to my About page to learn the full story.
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