Mad Honey: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel

Description:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Alternatingly heart-pounding and heartbreaking. This collaboration between two best-selling authors seamlessly weaves together Olivia and Lily’s journeys, creating a provocative exploration of the strength that love and acceptance require.”—The Washington Post

Look for Jodi Picoult’s new novel, By Any Other Name, available now!

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • PEOPLE’S BOOK OF THE WEEK • A POPSUGAR BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life—living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising their beautiful son, Asher—was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined that she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in and taking over her father’s beekeeping business.

Lily Campanello is familiar with do-overs, too. When she and her mom relocate to Adams, New Hampshire, for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start.

And for just a short while, these new beginnings are exactly what Olivia and Lily need. Their paths cross when Asher falls for the new girl in school, and Lily can’t help but fall for him, too. With Ash, she feels happy for the first time. Yet she wonders if she can trust him completely. . . .

Then one day, Olivia receives a phone call: Lily is dead, and Asher is being questioned by the police. Olivia is adamant that her son is innocent. But she would be lying if she didn’t acknowledge the flashes of his father’s temper in Ash, and as the case against him unfolds, she realizes he’s hidden more than he’s shared with her.

Mad Honey is a riveting novel of suspense, an unforgettable love story, and a moving and powerful exploration of the secrets we keep and the risks we take in order to become ourselves.

Review

Praise for Mad Honey

“Alternatingly heart-pounding and heartbreaking . . .This collaboration between two best-selling authors seamlessly weaves together Olivia and Lily’s journeys, creating a provocative exploration of the strength that love and acceptance require.”—The Washington Post

“Gripping . . . This timely and absorbing read will make readers glad these two powerful writers decided to collaborate.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Compelling . . . A well-paced story that highlights several timely issues, with a stimulating courtroom trial that makes it worth reading.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A spellbinding yarn . . . atmospheric . . . riveting . . . Overall, it’s a fruitful collaboration.”—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Jodi Picoult

“Picoult is a skilled wordsmith, and she beautifully creates situations that not only provoke the mind but touch the flawed souls in all of us.”—The Boston Globe

“Jodi Picoult is that rare, one-in-a-million writer whose books both squeeze your heart and expand your mind.”⁠—Emily Henry

Praise for Jennifer Finney Boylan

“Jennifer Finney Boylan is an exquisite writer.”—Augusten Burroughs

“One could not ask for a wiser, warmer, more engaging companion than Jennifer Finney Boylan.”—Mary Roach

About the Author

Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-nine novels, including Wish You Were Here, Small Great Things, Leaving Time, and My Sister’s Keeper, and, with daughter Samantha van Leer, two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page. Picoult lives in New Hampshire.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the bestselling author of more than a dozen books. She is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer-in-Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University and a 2022–2023 Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. A nationally known advocate for human rights, she is a trustee of PEN America. For many years she was the national co-chair of GLAAD as well as a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She lives in New York City and Belgrade Lakes, Maine, with her wife, Deedie. They have a son, Sean, and a daughter, Zai.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Olivia 1

December 7, 2018

The day of

From the moment I knew I was having a baby, I wanted it to be a girl. I wandered the aisles of department stores, touching doll-size dresses and tiny sequined shoes. I pictured us with matching nail polish—me, who’d never had a manicure in my life. I imagined the day her fairy hair was long enough to capture in pigtails, her nose pressed to the glass of a school bus window; I saw her first crush, prom dress, heartbreak. Each vision was a bead on a rosary of future memories; I prayed daily.

As it turned out, I was not a zealot . . . only a martyr.

When I gave birth, and the doctor announced the baby’s sex, I did not believe it at first. I had done such a stellar job of convincing myself of what I wanted that I completely forgot what I needed. But when I held Asher, slippery as a minnow, I was relieved.

Better to have a boy, who would never be someone’s victim.

Most people in Adams, New Hampshire, know me by name, and those who don’t, know to steer clear of my home. It’s often that way for beekeepers—like firefighters, we willingly put ourselves into situations that are the stuff of others’ nightmares. Honeybees are far less vindictive than their yellow jacket cousins, but people can’t often tell the difference, so anything that stings and buzzes comes to be seen as a potential hazard. A few hundred yards past the antique Cape, my colonies form a semicircular rainbow of hives, and most of the spring and summer the bees zip between them and the acres of blossoms they pollinate, humming a warning.

I grew up on a small farm that had been in my father’s family for generations: an apple orchard that, in the fall, sold cider and donuts made by my mother and, in the summer, had pick-your-own strawberry fields. We were land-rich and cash-poor. My father was an apiarist by hobby, as was his father before him, and so on, all the way back to the first McAfee who was an original settler of Adams. It is just far enough away from the White Mountain National Forest to have affordable real estate. The town has one traffic light, one bar, one diner, a post office, a town green that used to be a communal sheep grazing area, and Slade Brook—a creek whose name was misprinted in a 1789 geological survey map, but which stuck. Slate Brook, as it should have been written, was named for the eponymous rock mined from its banks, which was shipped far and wide to become tombstones. Slade was the surname of the local undertaker and village drunk, who had a tendency to wander off when he was on a bender, and who ironically killed himself by drowning in six inches of water in the creek.

When I first brought Braden to meet my parents, I told him that story. He had been driving at the time; his grin flashed like lightning. But who, he’d asked, buried the undertaker?

Back then, we had been living outside of DC, where Braden was a resident in cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins and I worked at the National Zoo, trying to cobble together enough money for a graduate program in zoology. We’d only been together three months, but I had already moved in with him. We were visiting my parents that weekend because I knew, viscerally, that Braden Fields was the one.

On that first trip back home, I had been so sure of what my future would hold. I was wrong on all counts. I never expected to be an apiarist like my father; I never thought I’d wind up sleeping in my childhood bedroom once again as an adult; I never imagined I’d settle down on a farm my older brother, Jordan, and I once could not wait to leave. I married Braden; he got a fellowship at Mass General; we moved to Boston; I was a doctor’s wife. Then, almost a year to the day of my wedding anniversary, my father didn’t come home one evening after checking his hives. My mother found him, dead of a heart attack in the tall grass, bees haloing his head.

My mother sold the piece of land that held our apple orchard to a couple from Brooklyn. She kept the strawberry fields but was thoroughly at a loss when it came to my father’s hives. Since my brother was busy with a high-powered legal career and my mother was allergic to bees, the apiary fell to me. For five years, I drove from Boston to Adams every week to take care of the colonies. After Asher was born, I’d bring him with me, leaving him in the company of my mother while I checked the hives. I fell in love with beekeeping, the slow-motion flow of pulling a frame out of a hive, the Where’s Waldo? search for the queen. I expanded from five colonies to fifteen. I experimented with bee genetics with colonies from Russia, from Slovenia, from Italy. I signed pollination contracts with the Brooklynites and three other local fruit orchards, setting up new hives on their premises. I harvested, processed, and sold honey and beeswax products at farmers’ markets from the Canadian border to the suburbs of Massachusetts. I became, almost by accident, the first commercially successful beekeeper in the history of apiarist McAfees. By the time Asher and I moved permanently to Adams, I knew I might never get rich doing this, but I could make a living.

My father taught me that beekeeping is both a burden and a privilege. You don’t bother the bees unless they need your help, and you help them when they need it. It’s a feudal relationship: protection in return for a percentage of the fruits of their labors.

He taught me that if a body is easily crushed, it develops a weapon to prevent that from happening.

He taught me that sudden movements get you stung.

I took these lessons a bit too much to heart.

On the day of my father’s funeral, and years later, on the day of my mother’s, I told the bees. It’s an old tradition to inform them of a death in the family; if a beekeeper dies, and the bees aren’t asked to stay on with their new master, they’ll leave. In New Hampshire, the custom is to sing, and the news has to rhyme. So I draped each colony with black crepe, knocked softly, crooned the truth. My beekeeping net became a funeral veil. The hive might well have been a coffin.

By the time I come downstairs that morning, Asher is in the kitchen. We have a deal, whoever gets up first makes the coffee. My mug still has a wisp of steam rising. He is shoveling cereal into his mouth, absorbed in his phone.

“Morning,” I say, and he grunts in response.

For a moment, I let myself stare at him. It’s hard to believe that the soft-centered little boy who would cry when his hands got sticky with propolis from the hives can now lift a super full of forty pounds of honey as if it weighs no more than his hockey stick. Asher is over six feet tall, but even as he was growing, he was never ungainly. He moves with the kind of grace you find in wildcats, the ones that can steal away a kitten or a chick before you even realize they’ve gone. Asher has my blond hair and the same ghost-green eyes, for which I have always been grateful. He carries his father’s last name, but if I also had to see Braden every time I looked at my son, it would be that much harder.

I catalog the breadth of his shoulders, the damp curls at the nape of his neck; the way the tendons in his forearms shift and play as he scrolls through his texts. It’s shocking, sometimes, to be confronted with this when a second ago he sat on my shoulders, trying to pull down a star and unravel a thread of the night.

“No practice this morning?” I ask, taking a sip of my coffee. Asher has been playing hockey as long as we’ve lived here; he skates as effortlessly as he walks. He was made captain as a junior and reelected this year, as a senior. I never can remember whether they have rink time before school or after, as it changes daily.

His lips tug with a slight smile, and he types a response into his phone, but doesn’t answer.

“Hello?” I say. I slip a piece of bread into the ancient toaster, which is jerry-rigged with duct tape that occasionally catches on fire. Breakfast for me is always toast and honey, never in short supply.

“I guess you have practice later,” I try, and then provide the answer that Asher doesn’t. “Why yes, Mom, thanks for taking such an active interest in my life.”

I fold my arms across my boxy cable-knit sweater. “Am I too old to wear this tube top?” I ask lightly.

Silence.

“I’m sorry I won’t be here for dinner, but I’m running away with a cult.”

I narrow my eyes. “I posted that naked photo of you as a toddler on Instagram for Throwback Thursday.”

Asher grunts noncommittally. My toast pops up; I spread it with honey and slide into the chair directly across from Asher. “I’d really prefer that you not use my Mastercard to pay for your Pornhub subscription.”

His eyes snap to mine so fast I think I can hear his neck crack. “What?”

“Oh, hey,” I say smoothly. “Nice to have your attention.”

Asher shakes his head, but he puts down his phone. “I didn’t use your Mastercard,” he says.

“I know.”

“I used your Amex.”

I burst out laughing.

Reviews:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting

K.M. · November 4, 2025

Love this book. Very interesting and informative. I learned a lot about Bees and Trans people. Good ending. The friend did it.

4.0 out of 5 stars A must read, very compelling story

S. · March 26, 2024

This book came highly recommended by book club friends, and it is definitely a compelling story. I will be discussing spoilers so if you do not want to know, please do not read beyond this point. It was a very compelling story which dealt in a sensitive issue both with the question of domestic violence, its unknown and known effects on children, and transgender youth. I thought that all of these issues were dealt with in a realistic, emotional, and real way. As author Boylan is transgender, I felt like it was her chance to give transgender individuals a much-needed voice. Lily personified what so many transgender individuals who are not able to provide a mirror to their inner lives and struggles. I also appreciated how Boylan educated us that being transgender is much like anything else in life-each transgender individual is unique, do not all think the same way, and especially do not have the same journey.Another strength in this story is the real and raw exploration of domestic violence. Yes, it was difficult to read. However, I think that Picoult and Boylan did an excellent job of exploring the large questions about abuse, what makes and abuser, and most importantly, what happens to the children of abusers? I admire how Picoult and Boylan were able to bring to life all the complex emotions of a mother whose son has turned into what seems her worst nightmare. She wanted to protect her son, she doubted him, and she loved him so much that she would do anything to protect him. She had to ask herself very difficult questions and face the reality of bearing her abuser's son. I was drawn into the complexities of Olivia's emotions and felt like I completely understood them.The only flaw in the writing is that the story became a bit outrageous and sensationalistic at the end. It felt more like the unlikely end of a TV movie rather than what should have been the end to a story which could have played in any courtroom in the United States. I just felt like it could have finished a bit more realistically, because the rest of the story was so compelling. I highly recommend this story for so many reasons, you will be educated and will experience the full gamut of emotions of a mother with an impossible burden.

5.0 out of 5 stars Looking at love from a completely different angle

J.S. · November 21, 2025

MAD HONEY is the second one of Jodi Picoult's books I've read, and it contains all the ingredients I've come to expect from her writing: beautiful prose, a compulsive plot line, relatable characters, and great twists. Picoult and co-author Jennifer Finley Boylan utilized a dual-timeline, multiple point-of-view approach in their writing. The result is a smooth introduction of backstory and an intriguing look at events through the eyes of several key players.The reader learns straightaway that single mom Olivia is a beekeeper and is raising teenage son Asher. Doing her trademark deep dive, Picoult provides lots of details about the lives of bees and beekeeping, and this becomes a powerful metaphor for family life and society at large. Asher is dating the multi-talented Lily, a cellist, champion fencer, and font of knowledge about various topics she's researched.Lily and her mother are newcomers to the small New Hampshire town that provides the story's backdrop, having migrated from Seattle. We learn that the motivating factor behind the move was a need to escape an abusive husband/father. Although both Lily and Asher are distanced from their fathers, we come to understand that there are very different reasons for the fractured parent-child relationships.Very little in this book is what it seems at first glance, and the authors have done a terrific job bringing the reader on a journey that reveals the truth bit by bit. There comes a point when medical information is doled out, and it is given in a sensitive, appropriate manner. I won't give spoilers, except to say that the courtroom drama is as compelling as any other part of the book, and that a murder is involved.It isn't until close to the end of the book that a definition of "mad honey" appears."THERE IS ONE type of honey you should avoid at all costs. Mad honey comes from bees that forage on rhododendrons and mountain laurel, and it’s full of poisonous grayanotoxins. It causes dizziness, nausea and vomiting, convulsions, cardiac disorders, and more. Symptoms last for twenty-four hours, and although rarely, if left untreated, can be fatal."The definition perfectly fits the final, shocking twist. I highly recommend MAD HONEY to readers who love sensitive treatments of social issues, lovely prose, and lovable but flawed characters. If you've read other books by Picoult, you'll understand exactly what this means. If not, dive in!

5.0 out of 5 stars Another fabulous must read book by Jodi

A.C. · November 5, 2025

Such a fabulous and eye opening read! Captivating and such a great read from teans to adults! Recommend to everyone

3.0 out of 5 stars meh

D.W. · November 1, 2025

I expected more from this book, it wasn’t a bad read but it just didn’t do I for me. I wasn’t bored but at the same time I wasn’t blown away by anything even the surprise at the end.

A surprisingly good read - in several ways

T. · September 20, 2025

Originally purchased for my daughter, definitely not my typical novel but I needed some holiday reading. To my surprise I finished the book, and got educated along the way.

Another amazing read from Jodi.

G.R.L. · May 11, 2025

Another wonder from Jodi. Love them all. This was so informative.

Excelente

M.B. · March 12, 2025

Excelente

Top Buch

F. · June 15, 2025

Echt spannende und dramatische Story

An eye opener

A. · November 12, 2025

I was totally, totally wrapped up in this book from the moment of our introduction! ☺️It weaves through a subject I love being involved in: bees.And it woke me up to a contentious subject I would never have thought of learning about but that I'll leave to new readers to discover.Thank you, Jennifer and Jodi, for broadening my horizons in such an intriguing way

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Mad Honey: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel

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Rating: 4.4 (10 reviews)

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Visit the Ballantine Books Store

Mad Honey: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel

Product ID: U1984818406

Condition: New

4.4

Mad Honey: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel-0

Type: Paperback

^AED88⁹¹

Price includes VAT & Import Duties

Availability: In Stock

Quantity:

Order today to get by 7-14 business days

Delivery fee of AED 20. Free for orders above AED 200.

Returns & Warranty policies

Imported From: United States

At BOLO, we work hard to ensure the products you receive are new, genuine, and sourced from reputable suppliers.

Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining transparency and integrity in every transaction.

Unless otherwise stated, all prices displayed on the product page include applicable taxes and import duties.

All items are shipped by air, and any products classified as “Dangerous Goods (DG)” under IATA regulations will be removed from the order and cancelled.

Description:

Review

About the Author

Reviews:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting

K.M. · November 4, 2025

Love this book. Very interesting and informative. I learned a lot about Bees and Trans people. Good ending. The friend did it.

4.0 out of 5 stars A must read, very compelling story

S. · March 26, 2024

5.0 out of 5 stars Looking at love from a completely different angle

J.S. · November 21, 2025

5.0 out of 5 stars Another fabulous must read book by Jodi

A.C. · November 5, 2025

Such a fabulous and eye opening read! Captivating and such a great read from teans to adults! Recommend to everyone

3.0 out of 5 stars meh

D.W. · November 1, 2025

I expected more from this book, it wasn’t a bad read but it just didn’t do I for me. I wasn’t bored but at the same time I wasn’t blown away by anything even the surprise at the end.

A surprisingly good read - in several ways

T. · September 20, 2025

Originally purchased for my daughter, definitely not my typical novel but I needed some holiday reading. To my surprise I finished the book, and got educated along the way.

Another amazing read from Jodi.

G.R.L. · May 11, 2025

Another wonder from Jodi. Love them all. This was so informative.

Excelente

M.B. · March 12, 2025

Excelente

Top Buch

F. · June 15, 2025

Echt spannende und dramatische Story

An eye opener

A. · November 12, 2025

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Multigenerational

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Mad Honey: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel

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Mad Honey: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel

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