With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.

This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her father’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.

In New York, she’s able to ignore all the annoying questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.

When you crack open Morgan Roger’s Honey Girl, the first thing you’ll notice is the power of her voice. Evocative, playful, inventive—this debut novel sings. And while Honey Girl lured us in with the powerhouse writing and an addictive married-in-Vegas trope, it was the story of Grace Porter tumbling into adulthood and learning to find herself that kept us turning the page.

Queer and Black in a world that expects her to be twice as good as everyone else just to get by, Grace has never had a lazy day in her life. With her PhD finally in hand, it’s time for all that hard work to pay off—just like she’d planned. But when Grace gets drunk, marries a girl she just met, and doesn’t get the job for which she’d been recommended, she registers that she needs to take space to breathe and pick herself back up. It’s these moments of stark self-awareness, combined with Roger’s visual and emotive storytelling, that provide the oomph in this story, and its most heartfelt throughline: that life doesn’t always go to plan, and that’s okay.

Honey Girl is about the journey of growing up, the importance of prioritizing mental health, and the beauty of found family. This debut speaks to the girl inside all of us who wants to be perfect, and—through bare-knuckled grit and hard-won perspective—realizes that, flaws and all, she is.