Risa Miller’s sec­ond nov­el is the dif­fi­cult sto­ry of the fam­i­ly rela­tion­ships between two daugh­ters, Hon­ey and Susan, and their father. Hon­ey and Susan lost their moth­er to breast can­cer when they were bare­ly teenagers and Hon­ey, in par­tic­u­lar, nev­er healed from the loss. When their father and his sec­ond wife, Eve­lyn, become baal tshu­vah fol­low­ing a trip to Israel, Hon­ey sees her father’s deci­sion as anoth­er bru­tal aban­don­ment, one that she can’t pos­si­bly tol­er­ate. Honey’s con­flict­ed and angry inter­nal dia­logue with reli­gion inten­si­fies when oblig­a­tions to fam­i­ly friends force her involve­ment in a neigh­bor­hood dis­pute with an obser­vant Jew­ish day school.
Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the nar­ra­tive of the book stalls out after its ini­tial set up. For long stretch­es Hon­ey rumi­nates on her anger. Her under­stand­ing of her emo­tions, her per­son­al phi­los­o­phy, and Judaism don’t evolve because Honey’s pent up fury over­whelms her world, and the pages of the book. As a result her sto­ry is an exhaust­ing and some­what tedious read. Even the novel’s res­o­lu­tion, from which Hon­ey does gain some com­fort, depends on a con­struct and not on the kind of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment that could make this book, with such fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant ques­tions at its core, tru­ly profound.