Alice Sadie Celine
A Novel
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- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
