Honey
Amber Young is a talented young singer who is determined to make it, and in 1997, the call to join the girl group Cloud9 is exactly what she's been dreaming of. This is the age of the pop princesses and the boy bands, and Amber is in the thick of it, chasing the reigning queens, falling in love with the pop idols, and seeing herself defined by the press. Behind the scenes is more complicated than any of the paparazzi narratives, and Amber has to determine which friends are true, what love is true, and most of all, what's true about herself--even as everyone else tries to define those things for her.
For readers who also came of age around the time of the pop superstars of the 90s, this novel will be particularly interesting—especially because we've watched many of them crumble as they reached middle age. While some of the teen dramas didn't resonate (there were times this felt a little YA), this did give the fictional stars and their relationships complexity that the public never got to see in tabloid stories swirling around the real stars of the 90s.
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Publisher’s Description
A coming-of-age story that follows the meteoric rise of singer Amber Young as she navigates fame in the late-1990s and early-2000s era of pop music superstardom
It is 1997, and Amber Young has received a life-changing call. It is 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, her rich interior life is frequently reduced. Surrounded by people who claim to love her but only wish to exploit her, 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.
Isabel Banta’s debut novel redefines the narratives of some of the most famous pop icons of the 1990s and 2000s. It reimagines the superstars we idolized and hated, oversexualized and underestimated, and gives them the fresh, multifaceted story they deserve.