Alice Sadie Celine

August 28, 2023
YA author Blakley-Cartwright (Red Riding Hood) makes her adult debut with an elegant study of three women exploring their gender and sexuality. Alice, 23, is an aspiring actor in Los Angeles whose favorite part of performing is “how easy it was to slip into another life.” Celine, 44, is a lesbian public intellectual and UC Berkeley professor famous for her critique of gender essentialism; she’s also the mother of Sadie, Alice’s best friend since high school. When Alice returns home to the San Francisco Bay Area to play Hermione in a community theater production of The Winter’s Tale, Sadie can’t attend and asks Celine to go in her stead. Celine, who in middle age has become terrified of conventionality, has an electrifying connection with Alice, and the two end up in bed. A parallel narrative follows Sadie’s plan to finally lose her virginity with her boyfriend, her interest in sex having been complicated by growing up with a radically sex-positive mom. Alice and Celine’s age gap is handled adeptly, the descriptions of the affair are titillating yet tender, and though the ruminations on motherhood and daughterhood tend to impede the story’s pacing, they’re packed with spiky insights (“Mothering, thought naïvely, was a task that could be completed, capped off, a checkmark on a to-do list”). This satisfies the head and the heart. Agent: Ellen Levine and Martha Wydysh, Trident Media Group.

September 15, 2023
What happens when a celebrated feminist carries on a highly charged affair with her only daughter's closest friend? Despite very different temperaments, Alice and Sadie have been inseparable since adolescence. They remain so in their early 20s, though easygoing Alice is halfheartedly pursuing an acting career in Los Angeles while hardworking Sadie remains in the Bay Area doggedly working her way up in a design firm. Celine is Sadie's mother, a professor of lesbian-feminist theory at Berkeley who works hard to remain unconventional. When Alice gets a part in a play and Sadie can't attend, she asks Celine to go in her place. A comic romantic nightmare ensues. Forty-four-year-old Celine is gobsmacked by her sudden attraction to Alice, whom she's never before found particularly interesting, and Alice, who has enjoyed sex with a lot of men, surprises herself by responding to Celine's attraction in kind. Caught up in their mutual desires and unable to acknowledge that Sadie may see their behavior as betrayal, the lovers tacitly agree not to mention their affair to her, even as weeks pass by. Meanwhile, Sadie is involved in her own sexual crisis: still being a virgin at age 23. Thanks to her unorthodox childhood with Celine, she's developed inhibitions she's trying to overcome, so far unsuccessfully, with her conveniently adoring, nerdy boyfriend--who, like Alice's and Sadie's fathers, remains so palely sketched he barely registers. The novel flits among the three women without going deep. Readers learn about Alice's emotionally chilly mother and sympathize with Sadie's trials as Celine's daughter. Ultimately, though, the novel belongs to Celine, a larger-than-life personality full of contradictions. Her boundless love can be smothering, her ideas smart but half-baked, her boundary-breaking playful and cruel. She's a would-be feminist goddess, monstrous yet hard to dislike. A lighthearted romp, tinged with melancholy, that gently pokes fun at sexual mores and those who defy them.

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October 15, 2023
The title characters of Blakley-Cartwright's (Red Riding Hood, 2011) first novel for adults have been thrown together by biology, choice, or lust. Celine married young and quickly became mom to Sadie before upending their small-town Ohio lives to study at Berkeley, where, now 44, she's a radical and downright famous professor of feminism and gender studies. Young twentysomethings Sadie and Alice have been best friends since high school, owing to a ""chance"" meeting that Sadie, ever calculating and controlled, actually secretly engineered. Preoccupied with finally losing her virginity to her boyfriend of a year (""Do you know how difficult it is to have a sex-positive parent?""), Sadie begs Celine to attend Alice's basement performance of A Winter's Tale in her stead. She won't know for months that this substitution led to Celine and Alice's steamy, bewildering affair: Alice's best friend's mom is hot, but sleeping with her also feels ""almost like a sex crime."" Blakley-Cartwright's stylish and quippy writing offers thoughtful commentary on the women's many-faceted, much-entangled relationships, and how they've shaped, and been shaped by, one another.

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