The Honeys

Gr 9 Up–Twin teens Caroline and Marshall (who is genderfluid and goes by Mars) grew up attending summer camp at the very exclusive and expensive Aspen Conservancy in the Catskills. Mars hasn’t gone in years, but when Caroline arrives home from Aspen unexpectedly and tries to kill Mars but ends up dead herself, he insists on taking her place there to discover the reason for her behavior. Upon arriving, Mars can sense the decay beneath the polished surface, but the longer he is there the less reliable his mind becomes. Between the distraction of cute, smart Wyatt and the friendship of Caroline’s camp sisterhood, The Honeys, Mars finds it more and more difficult to focus even as he is drawn closer to Aspen’s dark truth. La Sala deftly balances the persistent, deep ache of grief with a deeply unsettling and unnerving atmosphere where something is clearly and palpably wrong, carefully threading a string of clues that are just beyond readers until the right moment. The cloying nostalgia of the camp’s history provides the thinnest of covers for entrenched and fragile concepts of masculinity and propriety, a world where asking questions is dangerous and questioning the status quo is deadly. This layered, complex, and at times truly disturbing novel creates an ever-heightening level of suspense, ratcheting up to an explosive conclusion that readers will not see coming but will find imminently believable and completely unforgettable.