While we were all dancing and loving life to a backing track of Britney, Cristina and Avril (among others), back in the late ’90’s and early ‘noughties, did we ever stop to think of what was going on in their lives … in the background … how they got to where they were … how they were propelled into the spotlight, into “overnight success”? Honey by Isabel Banta is a magnetic, absorbing look at teenage girls aiming to achieve superstardom at a time where the entire music industry was managed and manipulated by arrogant, misogynistic men. While this is a work of fiction, it reminded me a bit of I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, which was not.
Blurb:
Inspired by the starlets of the 90s and noughties who became as infamous for their personal lives as their hypersexualised music videos and lyrics, Honey is a novel about the journey from girlhood to womanhood and how far we are willing to go in the pursuit of love . . .
It is 1997, and Amber Young has received a life-changing call. It’s a chance thousands of girls would die for: the opportunity to join girl group Cloud9 in Los Angeles and escape her small town. She quickly finds herself in the orbits of fellow rising stars Gwen Morris, a driven singer-dancer, and Wes Kingston, a member of the biggest boy band in the world, ETA.
As Amber embarks on her solo career and her fame intensifies, she increasingly finds herself reduced to a body, a voice, an object. Surrounded by the wrong kind of people and driven by a desire for recognition and success, for love and sex, for agency and connection, Amber comes of age at a time when the kaleidoscope of public opinion can distort everything, and one mistake can shatter a career.
My Review:
In the late 1990’s when girl bands and boy bands were the thing, I don’t think many of us stopped to think about think about the actual lives of those people chasing fame and fortune who we kept hearing every time we switched on a radio, and whose faces we saw on just about every magazine cover. Did we believe everything we read? I’m not sure, but we went along with the hype anyway. And when the stars reached higher and higher, they were so far out of our reach that they became even more ‘imaginary’ to us … even more unlike real people. So we never even imagined what could be going on behind the scenes.
Honey gives us a no-holds-barred look at what was really going on, and while this is a work of fiction, one can’t help thinking that this has been written by someone who knows the inside story because it all rings so very scarily true all these years later when we’re (hopefully?) a lot more savvy about what goes on behind the scenes of super-stardom.
Amber Young has always dreamed of being a star and then her wish finally comes true. She’s propelled up the ranks and I started to murmer to myself (on repeat) “be careful what you wish for …” While she’s one of a group of young girls who are ‘chosen’, they’re not all given the same treatment and we see how ‘management’ of the big record companies that they’re all clamouring to be signed to, decides to mould their differing images in ways that they think will work in their favour. Whose favour? Well, not necessarily the girls themselves, that’s for sure! They’re basically the last ones to be considered.
Unfortunately for Amber, she’s the one who they seem to decide will be the scapegoat – and if she’s the record company management’s scapegoat, then you can be sure that anything and everything she does will be manipulated to seem negative in the eyes of the public! My heart ached for her, as she worked her butt off for recognition, only to be knocked back down every time she managed to scrape her way towards gaining some positivity in the competition to get to the top. But it wasn’t only the fame that she craved, she just wanted some love and attention – not even adoration; just some care. There were so many times that I wanted to reach out and give her a hug. She didn’t get enough of those during so many difficult years.
I think my favourite character though would have to be Sonny, Amber’s long-suffering personal manager, who supports her and tries to guide her through thick and thin. He’s her champion, her saviour, her rock. He also becomes her family, and while we’re on that point, let’s talk about my least favourite character, Amber’s Mom, who defines the words ‘absent parenting’. After schlepping her around the cattle call of auditions when she’s barely into her teens, as soon as it looks like Amber has her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder to success,she more or less walks away, dumping her in the lions’ den to be mauled by anyone who feels that they own the right to do so – and I don’t mean physically; I mean emotionally and professionally. Believe me, when you read what went on here, you’ll realize that’s a lot worse than any physical abuse!
This is an absorbing, magnetic, although often disturbing read. I found myself angered to realize that as much as these young girls were (and I’m sure still are) manipulated by a bunch of arrogant, controlling men, so were we, the public, who are fed lie after lie for the sake of their chosen narrative. I’d like to think that most of those young women who’ve reached SuperNova status today have achieved it by having a lot more say over how they got there!
Thank you to Compulsive Readers and Zaffre Books for a fabulous blog tour!
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