What is Mad Honey about?
Mad Honey is a novel co-written by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, published in October 2022. The story takes place in Adams, a small town in New Hampshire, and unfolds in the alternating first-person voices of two characters: Olivia McAfee, a teenager who has moved to Adams with her mother after escaping an abusive father in Boston, and Asher Prentiss, a teenage boy and beekeeper whose own father has a history of violence. Olivia and Asher fall in love. Then Olivia is found dead. The novel is structured as both a love story and a mystery: the chapters alternate between two timelines — "before" (the development of Olivia and Asher's relationship) and "after" (the investigation of Olivia's death and the question of who is responsible). Through the lens of the mystery, the novel explores domestic abuse, transgender identity, toxic masculinity, the reliability of memory, and how quickly a small community forms judgments. Mad Honey takes its title from the rare toxin produced by bees that have fed on rhododendrons — a phenomenon that runs as a metaphor through the novel's themes of beauty concealing danger.
What genre is Mad Honey?
Mad Honey is contemporary fiction that crosses between literary mystery, coming-of-age story, and issue novel. Picoult is known for structurally ambitious novels that center on ethical and social questions — My Sister's Keeper, The Storyteller, Small Great Things — and Mad Honey fits that tradition while also being her first co-authored novel and one of her most explicitly LGBTQ+ inclusive works. Boylan, a memoirist and professor who is transgender, brought particular depth to the novel's portrayal of a transgender character. The dual-author, dual-voice structure is unusual in commercial fiction, and the execution — readers generally cannot tell the voices apart stylistically — has been praised. The novel is appropriate for older teens and adults.
How many chapters are in Mad Honey?
Mad Honey summary
Olivia McAfee and her mother Briana have moved from Boston to Adams, New Hampshire to escape Olivia's father, Bree's ex-husband, who has been abusive. Adams is small and quiet — the opposite of everything Olivia's life in Boston was — and she is starting junior year at a new school where she knows no one.
Asher Prentiss has lived in Adams his whole life. His father Eli is a beekeeper and has a reputation for volatility — a history the town knows about without discussing openly. Asher has grown up in his father's shadow, aware that people watch him for signs of what his father is, afraid of becoming what he fears. He has channeled his anxiety into beekeeping, inheriting his father's hives and developing a genuine passion for the work.
Olivia and Asher meet and fall into the careful, electric process of falling in love. Olivia is funny and direct; Asher is thoughtful and a little wary. The chapters labeled "before" follow this relationship across the fall — their first conversations, their growing closeness, their first conflict, their reconciliation. Also woven through these chapters is the story of Lily, Asher's best friend, who is transgender and navigating her identity in a small town that is not uniformly welcoming.
The chapters labeled "after" begin with Olivia found dead at the foot of the stairs in Asher's house. Asher is the obvious suspect — he was the last person to see her, they had argued, and his father's history of violence makes the community immediately suspicious of the Prentiss family. Asher maintains he didn't do it. The investigation unfolds through both timelines as the reader assembles what actually happened.
The novel does not hold its mystery until the final pages. Gradually, the before chapters reveal what was happening in Olivia and Asher's relationship that the after chapters' investigators don't yet know. The picture that emerges is more complicated than the obvious narrative — and involves multiple forms of violence, concealment, and the way communities construct stories about people before the facts are established.
Running through both timelines is the metaphor of mad honey: the toxin produced when bees feed on rhododendrons, which looks identical to ordinary honey but can cause hallucinations, seizures, and death. Asher teaches Olivia about it early in their relationship. Something can look like one thing and be another. Sweetness and danger can coexist.
How does Mad Honey end?
Characters in Mad Honey
Olivia McAfee — One of the two narrators. Intelligent, funny, carrying the weight of her father's abuse and her mother's attempts to start over. Her voice in the before chapters builds a portrait of a person whose death, in the after chapters, feels like a genuine loss.
Asher Prentiss — The other narrator. A thoughtful, careful teenager who has spent his life aware of what his father is and determined not to replicate it. His relationship with Olivia and his position as the primary suspect structure the novel's emotional tension.
Lily — Asher's best friend, who is transgender. Her story — the family dynamics around her identity, the social dynamics of a small town, her relationship with Asher and with herself — is one of the novel's most carefully drawn threads.
Eli Prentiss — Asher's father, a beekeeper with a documented history of violence. His presence in the novel is a study in how domestic abusers are known and not-known by their communities simultaneously.
Briana McAfee — Olivia's mother, who has upended her life to get her daughter away from Olivia's father. Her perspective on what she missed and what she could have done differently runs through the after sections.
Quotes from Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan
Mad Honey uses its beekeeping metaphor to frame questions about appearance, danger, and what lies beneath the surface.
"How similar does someone have to be to you before you remember to see them, first, as human?"
"Sometimes, making the world a better place just involves creating space for the people who are already in it."
"If you want to understand something, you first need to accept the fact of your own ignorance. And then, you need to talk to people who know more than you do, people who have not just thought about the facts, but lived them."
Frequently asked questions
Is Mad Honey based on a true story?
Mad Honey is fiction, though like most Jodi Picoult novels it is extensively researched and engages with real social issues — specifically domestic abuse, transgender identity, and the dynamics of how small communities respond to crime and difference. The beekeeping details are factually accurate; mad honey is a real phenomenon. Picoult and Boylan have both spoken about the research they conducted for the novel, including consulting with beekeepers, law enforcement, domestic violence advocates, and members of the transgender community. The specific characters and events are invented.
Why did Jodi Picoult co-write Mad Honey with Jennifer Finney Boylan?
Picoult and Boylan are longtime friends who met at a writing event. Boylan is a memoirist, novelist, and English professor at Barnard College who is transgender; her memoirs She's Not There and Stuck in the Middle with You are widely read accounts of her transition and family life. Picoult wanted to write a novel with a transgender character and recognized that she needed a co-author who could bring authentic lived experience to that portrayal. The dual-narrator structure — Olivia and Asher — is also a dual-author structure, with each writer primarily responsible for one voice, though both revised the other's work. The collaboration is Picoult's first co-authored novel.
What is mad honey in real life?
Mad honey, also called grayanotoxin honey, is real. It is produced when bees collect nectar from certain species of rhododendron and related plants (azaleas, mountain laurel). The nectar contains grayanotoxins, which the bees incorporate into the honey without apparent effect on themselves but which can cause significant symptoms in humans: dizziness, nausea, low blood pressure, and at high enough doses, hallucinations, seizures, and cardiac events. It has been documented since antiquity — Xenophon recorded soldiers becoming incapacitated after eating honey in the mountains of what is now Turkey in 401 BC. It is produced commercially in small quantities in the Black Sea region of Turkey, where it is consumed in very small amounts for supposed health benefits.
What is Mad Honey's connection to Jodi Picoult's other novels?
Mad Honey fits within Picoult's broader body of work in its structure and concerns. Like My Sister's Keeper, it centers on a moral and legal question involving a family crisis and uses multiple perspectives to show how the same events look different depending on who is observing them. Like Small Great Things, it engages directly with a contemporary social justice issue — here, transgender identity and domestic abuse — while embedding it in a thriller plot that creates narrative urgency. The before/after timeline structure is one Picoult has used in various forms throughout her career. Mad Honey differs from most Picoult novels primarily in its co-authorship and in the particular intimacy of its dual teenage narrators.
Is Mad Honey appropriate for teenagers?
Mad Honey is written for adult readers and older teenagers. It deals directly and without euphemism with domestic abuse, murder, and transgender identity, and includes depictions of violence (not graphically described but clearly present). The teenage narrators and coming-of-age elements make it appealing to older teen readers, and it has been widely assigned and discussed in high school classrooms, where its treatment of transgender identity has been both praised and, in some districts, challenged. Picoult and Boylan have been vocal advocates for the novel in book-banning discussions.
What does the beekeeping symbolism mean in Mad Honey?
Beekeeping runs through the novel on multiple levels. On a literal level, Asher is a beekeeper and the hives are central to his identity and his relationship with his father. On a symbolic level, the beehive represents community: organized, purposeful, capable of both nurturing and stinging, operating on rules that outsiders don't always understand. Mad honey specifically represents the novel's central theme — things that appear to be one thing but are another. Olivia and Asher's relationship looks like a simple teenage romance; Adams looks like a safe small town; certain characters present themselves as one thing while being another. The mad honey metaphor gives the novel its most compressed statement of what it is about: beauty and danger coexisting in a form you cannot distinguish until it is too late.
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