Heavy Cream

Sixteen-year-old Geraldine is left to navigate New York’s high society after her mother disappears, falling under the influence of three women each seeking to form her in their image.

Growing up on the road, it has always been the two of them, locked in dysfunction. Homeschooled, Gerry hasn’t learned much math. Instead, her mother has taught her how to spend the day at a motel’s swimming pool without being a guest or how to dodge paying extra for the chicken on a Caesar salad.

Gerry learns how to pass and adapt, but when she is abandoned in the city, Gerry finds herself in the care of three very different women, each intent on shaping her into competing and incompatible selves. First, there is her mother’s old college friend Bonnie, who lives in a world of country clubs and chintzy domesticity. Then there is Nell, her mother’s estranged sister and a successful artist who insists on ambition and self-invention. And finally Finley, an old-money socialite who ushers Gerry into a rarefied world of Manhattan privilege.

A coming-of-age novel that explores unconventional forms of motherhood and caretaking, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s new novel is both a charming comedy of manners and a deeply probing look at the complexities of love, mental illness, and inheritance, and one young woman’s eccentric path to selfhood.