BITTER HONEY

A mother and daughter in Sweden struggle to overcome the effects of colonial thinking about their Black bodies.

“Honey” is the title of 20-year-old Tina’s hit single, a song that is catapulting her to the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest. The honey refers to her own striking eyes, inherited from the white Swedish father she’s never known. As Tina navigates fame and failure, with the support of her white boyfriend, Sebastian, the narrative swings back to her mother Nancy’s arrival in Sweden from Gambia in the 1970s, a scholarship student with political ambitions. At university, she falls in love with Malik, but there is another man on the scene, anthropology professor Lars Wikström, who speaks their native language and is besotted with Nancy. When Lars insists on photographing his “muse” for a series of paintings and Malik is sent back to Gambia on trumped-up charges, Nancy is left vulnerable to the older man who has been grooming her. Nancy ends up pregnant, her dreams derailed, while the erotic paintings, Lars’ colonization of her body, make him a millionaire. As the novel progresses, chapters toggling between Nancy in the ’80s and Tina in the ’00s, it becomes clear that both mother and daughter have to struggle with authenticity in a society eager to label and commodify their Blackness. Tina, who has become a target for racially motivated derision in her native Sweden, accepts an offer to record an album in Los Angeles. When the two timelines finally converge, villainous Lars reappears. The exploration of identity is nicely paired with just enough melodrama—drug- and sex-fueled Hollywood parties, shocking secrets, explosive confrontations, and the angst of an artist—to keep the plot buzzing along.

Deliciously addictive—a family drama with compelling social commentary.