Mad Honey – Jodi Picoult (2022)

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, published in 2022, is a poignant and suspenseful contemporary novel that deftly interweaves a gripping mystery with themes of identity, trauma, and motherly love. Set in the quaint New England town of Adams, New Hampshire, the novel follows two women – Olivia McAfee, a beekeeper with a harrowing past, and Lily Campanello, a brilliant, spirited high school senior – whose lives collide through Olivia’s son, Asher. Told in alternating perspectives, the novel explores how secrets, both past and present, reverberate through lives and relationships, culminating in a murder investigation that forces the characters to confront truths they tried to bury.

Plot Summary

In the town of Adams, New Hampshire, where snow drapes the hills and silence comes early in the evening, Olivia McAfee keeps bees. Her life hums with the rhythm of the hives – precise, delicate, orderly – a soothing contrast to the chaos she fled from years ago. Once married to a charismatic but violent cardiac surgeon, Olivia rebuilt a life for her son Asher and herself on her family’s farm. She returned not just to the land but to the inheritance of bees, learning their secrets and relying on their steadiness. Asher, now in his final year of high school, is her pride – captain of the hockey team, artistic in secret, beloved in public.

Lily Campanello arrives in Adams that fall, all sharp wit and deep eyes, carrying a cello and a past that trails behind her like smoke. Her mother, Ava, a ranger turned administrator, has spent Lily’s life building escape routes and safe havens. Adams was supposed to be their new beginning. Lily enrolls in school, joins the orchestra, and meets Asher. Their connection sparks like flint. Within weeks, they are inseparable – the golden boy and the mysterious girl – orbiting each other in the slow burn of teenage love. Olivia watches their affection with cautious approval, moved by Lily’s pixie spirit and the way Asher softens in her presence.

But something ferments under the surface. Lily’s past life in California is shadowed by pain, by fear, by a father who made her wear long sleeves and flinch from praise. And Asher, who seems to glide through life, has inherited more than his mother’s green eyes. He has inherited a temper, a stubborn streak, a fear of being abandoned. Their love, too intense for a small town and its watching eyes, becomes volatile.

One night, Olivia receives a call from Asher. He’s at the police station. Lily is dead.

The town, stunned by the news, turns quickly. Whispers dart through the air like bees disturbed in a hive. Asher, who had everything, is arrested and charged with Lily’s murder. Olivia, who has buried her own truths, is thrust into the center of a storm. She doesn’t know whether to trust the boy she raised or to fear what he might be capable of. She remembers how Braden, her husband, was all charm until the day he wasn’t. She remembers slammed doors, broken noses, and apologies like poisoned honey. And she wonders if rage can seep into blood, if violence is passed down like eye color or handedness.

The trial that follows is not just about a girl who died. It becomes a mirror for every hidden part of Olivia and Asher’s lives. Ava, devastated, sits on the other side of the courtroom, her daughter reduced to a name in legal arguments. The prosecution paints Asher as a jealous boyfriend. The defense, led by Olivia’s estranged brother Jordan, tries to show another side – a boy who loved too hard, a girl with secrets. And there are secrets.

Lily had been born Liam. A detail that changes everything in the eyes of the public, though it changes nothing about who she was to those who loved her. When the truth of her identity is revealed in court, it sends shockwaves through the community. The narrative shifts, distorted by bias and prejudice. The prosecution hints that Asher didn’t know. That he reacted with violence. But Olivia knows her son did know. And he chose to love Lily anyway. This is the kind of boy she believes she raised.

Lily’s voice echoes in the story, woven through moments that shimmer with longing, music, and memory. Her cello was her refuge, her art a form of truth she could not always speak aloud. She trusted Asher. She opened to him not just her body but her history. She wanted a future. She applied to Oberlin, dreamed of stages and concertos and applause that felt like freedom. But something broke between them. A moment of betrayal, a confrontation in the snow, a bruise on her arm, and then five days of silence. The day she died, she was sick and alone, waiting for her mother to come home.

The doorbell rang.

Asher claims he found her lying at the foot of the stairs. He says she wasn’t breathing. That he called 911. That he tried to save her.

There are no witnesses.

The evidence is circumstantial.

And yet, the weight of suspicion is heavy. Olivia tries to stay composed, to be the mother she’s always been. But inside, she begins to crack. She searches through Asher’s drawings, reads his secret notebooks, revisits the past she buried. She finds herself asking the same question the world does: what if?

The bees continue to hum, even in winter. Olivia tends them with injured hands, her mind spinning with memory and doubt. She remembers the lessons her father taught her – about hives, about patience, about protection. She thinks about how a queen bee, when no longer wanted, is swarmed and suffocated by her own.

The trial reaches its end, and the jury deliberates. Asher is acquitted. There is relief, but it is hollow. Olivia feels it in the courtroom – the breath that escapes but never fills her lungs.

But truth, like honey, is slow to pour and impossible to contain forever.

It is Lily who carries the truth, even in death. In her final moments, clarity had come like the last movement of a suite. She had realized what she needed – not from Asher, not from Oberlin, but from herself. A message, carefully hidden, emerges – her voice preserved like waxed wings. She hadn’t been pushed. She hadn’t been struck. She had opened the door, and she had let her father in.

It had been him. The man who had once beaten her until she bled. Who had been brought to town under the guise of love and forgiveness. Asher hadn’t known. Asher had never hurt her. He had only loved her.

The truth, fragile as comb, is revealed too late. But it glistens nonetheless.

Back in Adams, the snow begins to melt. Olivia walks among her hives. The bees are stirring. They have survived the winter. Inside the boxes, the queen is alive. Life moves forward, one wingbeat at a time.

Main Characters

• Olivia McAfee is a single mother and beekeeper who has escaped an abusive marriage and returned to her childhood home to raise her son. She is resilient and introspective, often drawing metaphors from beekeeping to interpret the world. Olivia’s devotion to Asher is fierce and unwavering, and her emotional journey involves wrestling with whether violence can be inherited and if she has truly escaped her past.

• Asher Fields, Olivia’s teenage son, is a charismatic and seemingly well-adjusted high school senior. Athletic and popular, Asher’s life begins to unravel when his girlfriend Lily is found dead, and he becomes the prime suspect. His complexity deepens as the story explores his tenderness, artistic inclinations, and buried anger.

• Lily Campanello is a talented, enigmatic girl with a painful history, including being transgender and surviving abuse. Her relationship with Asher becomes the emotional core of the story. Lily’s sections reveal her longing for love, security, and self-acceptance, as well as her struggle to trust in a world that has too often failed her.

• Ava Campanello, Lily’s mother, is a former park ranger who has sacrificed greatly to protect and support her daughter. Ava is fiercely protective, wise, and bears the weight of a parent who has endured significant emotional and logistical battles for her child’s safety and identity.

• Mike Newcomb, the local detective, is both a figure of law and a man with a personal history tied to Olivia. His role in the investigation blurs the lines between duty and personal bias.

Theme

• Identity and Transformation: The most prominent theme, especially through Lily’s character, explores gender identity and the painful, beautiful process of becoming one’s true self. The motif of bees and their metamorphosis mirrors this theme, symbolizing nature’s complex way of affirming identity.

• Love and Protection: The fierce love between parent and child is explored through Olivia and Ava. Each mother is willing to go to extraordinary lengths for their child, and the novel challenges the idea of what protection looks like – whether through silence, lies, or truth.

• Secrets and Truth: Characters guard personal secrets to protect themselves and others, yet the story reveals how these truths eventually demand confrontation. The murder mystery becomes a metaphor for this moral and emotional unmasking.

• Trauma and Survival: Both Olivia and Lily are survivors of abuse, and their journeys reflect how trauma imprints itself on memory, behavior, and relationships. The novel respects the nuances of healing and the courage it takes to reclaim one’s narrative.

• Nature as Reflection: Beekeeping is not only Olivia’s livelihood but a central metaphor throughout the novel. The order and chaos of the hive, the threat of collapse, and the endurance of the queen all echo the emotional and thematic architecture of the story.

Writing Style and Tone

The prose in Mad Honey is rich, poetic, and often deeply metaphorical, especially in Olivia’s chapters, which incorporate lyrical reflections on beekeeping as a parallel to life, motherhood, and womanhood. Jennifer Finney Boylan’s voice through Lily is precise, intimate, and emotionally resonant, capturing the tender internal monologue of a young woman navigating a complex world with wit and yearning. The dual narrative structure heightens suspense, allowing readers to slowly unravel both the mystery and the characters’ histories.

The tone oscillates between tender introspection and simmering tension. Picoult and Boylan use this duality to cultivate empathy while confronting prejudice, violence, and social injustice. There’s a deliberate pacing that lures the reader into moments of calm before disrupting them with emotionally charged revelations. Throughout, the novel maintains a reverent and compassionate tone, especially in how it handles gender identity and trauma, while not shying away from the raw emotions that surface in times of crisis.