Alice Sadie Celine, Sarah BlakleyCartwright
Alice Sadie Celine, Sarah BlakleyCartwright
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Alice Sadie Celine

Author: Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

Narrator: Chloë Sevigny

Unabridged: 8 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/28/2023


Synopsis

“Obsessed!” —Chloë Sevigny
“I am literally obsessed.” —Busy Philipps

Hailed as “richly intimate” and “wickedly delightful” (The New York Times Book Review), this steamy and incisive debut adult novel follows one woman’s affair with her daughter’s best friend, testing the limits of love and ambition.

It’s the opening night, but Alice’s performance in the local Bay Area production of The Winter’s Tale is far from glamourous. She doesn’t have dreams of stardom, but the basement theater in a wildfire-choked town isn’t exactly what she envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming.

Pragmatic, serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school—really one another’s only friend—but now that they are through with college (which they attended together) and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend’s support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother, Celine.

A professor of women’s and gender studies at UC Berkeley, Celine’s landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but she’s struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminist world. So, when Sadie begs her to attend Alice’s play, she relents, if only to escape writer’s block. But in a turn of perplexing events, Celine becomes entranced by Alice’s performance and realizes that her daughter’s once lanky, slightly annoying best friend is now an irresistible young woman.

Set over the course of decades—from Alice and Sadie’s early friendship days and Celine’s decision to leave her husband to the radical movements of the 1990s Berkeley and navigating contemporary Hollywood—Alice and Celine’s love affair will test the limits of their love for Sadie and their own beliefs of power, agency, and feminism. Witty and relatable, sexy and surprising, Sarah Blakely-Cartwright’s adult debut is a “heartfelt, smart, and keenly observed take on friendship” (Town & Country) and a mesmerizing portrait of the inner lives of three very different women.

About Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright is the author of Alice Sadie Celine and Red Riding Hood, a #1 New York Times bestseller published worldwide in thirty-eight editions and fifteen languages. She is the editor of Hauser & Wirth’s The Artist’s Library for Ursula magazine and an associate editor at A Public Space.


Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on June 24, 2024

a friend and i joked recently that whenever someone says "can you believe ai made this," we watch every video and read every paragraph like...yeah. yes, we can. this book manages to do the inverse: i'm pretty sure it was written by a person, and yet it would make a whole lot more sense if it were by......more

Goodreads review by meghan ‎ ‎𐦍 on October 23, 2023

this is a work of aaaaaaaAarrrrrtttt (insert that annoying tiktok sound). this novel is weird, yes, but it’s fucking beautiful. ok ok i’ll tell why! for the majority of this book i mostly just felt icky and uncomfy (*cough* CELINE) but then at some point around the end of the second part i started t......more

Goodreads review by Lindsey on February 06, 2024

It's actually impressive how insufferable this book is. That was definitely among the most ridiculous eye-roll inducing things I've ever read and also set lesbians back 40 years......more

Goodreads review by Natalie on May 01, 2023

This is such an enjoyable and original novel. The triangle at tge center of the book is a mother, daughter and the daughter’s best friend. The author has filled the book with unexpected variations. The romantic/erotic relationship is certainly unusual. There are consequences involved as the trio pla......more

Goodreads review by Emma Ann on July 29, 2023

A story about motherhood, sisterhood, and friendship, and about how messy things can get when the lines between relationships blur. This book was incredibly human and, mostly, incredibly readable and good—except for the last chapter, which made a few choices that baffled me. Thank you to the publishe......more