A Sisterly Road Trip
We are closing out August the way we opened it — with something that moves between the personal and the wild, the tender and the fierce. On Tuesday we gave you the context for today’s book. Today we go all the way in.
Hello Girls by Emily Henry and Brittany Cavallaro is a road trip novel, a survival story, and one of the most honest portraits of chosen sisterhood we have read in years. It is also the book that a lot of Emily Henry fans do not know exists — which means you may be about to discover a new favorite from a writer you already love.
Hello Girls by Emily Henry & Brittany Cavallaro
Before we get into the book, a word about how it was made. Emily Henry and Brittany Cavallaro wrote this novel in alternating perspectives — Henry wrote Lucille, Cavallaro wrote Winona — and the collaboration is so seamless that you would never know it was split. The voices are distinct but the heart of the novel is unified. That unity is the point. The book is, at its core, about what two very different people can build together when they choose each other.
Winona
From the outside, Winona Olsen’s life looks like everything. The house is beautiful. Her father is charming and admired and the kind of man who always knows what to say in a room full of people. Inside that beautiful house, he has been slowly, methodically controlling everything — what Winona wears, who she sees, what she believes about herself and her own worth. She has been starving in plain sight, and no one around her has noticed, or has chosen not to.
Winona is not waiting to be rescued. She is waiting for the right moment to rescue herself. She just has not yet figured out how.
Lucille
Lucille Pryce’s problems are louder and less hidden. Her family is involved in something dangerous, and no matter how many hours she works, how carefully she saves, how thoroughly she plans, the money disappears and the danger stays. She has been holding her family together with both hands since she was old enough to understand what holding things together required. She is exhausted and furious and very, very done.
She is also, it turns out, exactly the kind of person Winona needs.
The Road
The two girls meet outside a police station — neither is there for a good reason — and recognize something in each other with the speed that only happens in books and in real life when you have been alone with something for too long and suddenly someone looks at you and you know they understand. They steal a car. They point it toward Las Vegas, where Winona’s mother may or may not be waiting. They go.
What follows is the road trip section of the novel, which is funny and propulsive and full of the specific joy of watching two people discover they have found their person. It is also, underneath all of that, a serious book about what girls and young women are expected to absorb quietly — the control, the danger, the smallness of the lives they are handed — and what it looks like when two of them decide, together, to refuse.
The anger in Hello Girls is real and it is earned. Henry and Cavallaro do not sand it down or make it more palatable. They let it be exactly what it is: the reasonable, clarifying response of two young women who have had enough and have found, in each other, the courage to say so out loud.
What Makes This a Chosen Sisterhood Story
Winona and Lucille are not related. They do not have a shared history. They meet as strangers and become, over the course of a few hundred miles and a series of increasingly chaotic decisions, the most important people in each other’s lives. That transformation is the emotional center of the book, and Henry and Cavallaro earn every step of it.
What they build together is not just friendship. It is the kind of relationship where you stop performing and start telling the truth. Where the other person’s belief in you becomes something you can lean on when your own belief runs out. Where you are accountable to each other in a way that feels like freedom rather than obligation. That is what chosen sisterhood looks like when fiction gets it exactly right.
Brit + Co called the book funny and dark in the best of ways. Readers who came to it through Henry’s adult work frequently describe it as the book that made them understand where all that warmth and fierceness in her later novels comes from. And for readers who loved Thelma and Louise or Dumplin’ or any story about girls on the run from the lives they were handed — this is the book that was made for you.
If Hello Girls Is Your Next Read, Try These After
The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han — if you want the warmth without the danger, this is the summertime sister-friendship story that has stayed with readers for fifteen years.
Ace of Spades by Faridah Abike-Iyimide — a different kind of girl-rage, a different kind of institution to survive. Sharp, dark, and very hard to put down. Watch the book review video:
The Last Bee Fact of August: Bees Have Feelings
We have saved the best for last. And possibly the most astonishing.
In 2024, researchers at Newcastle University published findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that shook up what science thought it knew about insect inner lives. They discovered that bumblebees — when subjected to stress — exhibit something that looks a great deal like a pessimistic emotional state. Not metaphorically. Measurably.
In the study, bees were trained to associate different colors with different levels of reward. Once they had learned those associations, some bees experienced a simulated predatory attack — the bee equivalent of a genuinely bad day. Afterward, when those stressed bees were shown ambiguous cues that could signal either a high or a low reward, they consistently chose the low reward. They had stopped expecting good things. They had, in the language of the researchers, become pessimistic.
Dr. Vivek Nityananda, one of the lead researchers, was careful about what this does and does not mean: we may never know whether bees feel something in the way humans feel things, he said — whether there is a subjective, interior experience to their stress. But their behavior tells a clear story. When bees are hurt or frightened, they stop believing the world will offer them something good. They protect themselves by expecting less. That is not instinct in the simple sense. That is something closer to a wound.
What Bees Know That Sisters Know Too
Here is where it connects to this week, to this month, to every book we have featured about the women who love each other through the hard parts.
A bee that has been stressed does not have to stay pessimistic alone. The hive regulates. Other bees return. The colony’s collective warmth, its shared labor and shared purpose, creates conditions in which a single bee can recover. The hive does not ask the stressed bee to pretend she is fine. It simply keeps functioning around her, with her, until she is.
That is what the best female friendships do. That is what Winona and Lucille do for each other in Hello Girls. That is what Nona and Julia are slowly, painfully learning to do again in Where Wild Peaches Grow. That is what every book we have read this August — every sister story, every chosen family, every friendship forged in difficulty — has been circling.
When one of us stops expecting good things, the others keep going. We keep returning. We stay. We are, in the end, not so different from the bees.
That is the last bee fact of August. It is also, we think, the truest one.
Today’s Honey Bee Fun Fact - Did You Know?
Bees have feelings:
Thank You for Reading With Us This August
August is almost behind us. It has been one of the richest months we have had at The Mojito Reader — honey bees and book bans, chosen sisters and estranged ones, dark academia and Southern homecomings, cozy mysteries and road trips and a romance that meets on the same day every year for five years running. We are grateful for every reader who came along for it.
September is coming, and with it a whole new set of stories. We will see you Tuesday.
The Mojito Reader · Book Reviews, Book Club Chats & Literary Escapes · Published Every Tuesday and Thursday
Comments