Alice Sadie Celine

Summary: "It's opening night, but far from glamorous. Alice is performing in a local Bay Area production of The Winter's Tale, the complete opposite of what she had envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. She doesn't have dreams of superstardom per se, but the basement theatre in a wildfire-choked town simply isn't ideal. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming. Pragmatic and serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school-really one another's only friends--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 feminism world. When Sadie begs her to attend Alice's play, she relents, if only for an escape from writer's block. But in a turn of events perplexing even to herself, Celine becomes entranced by Alice's performance and realizes that her daughter's lanky, slightly annoying, best friend is now an irresistible young woman. Set over the course of decades--from Alice and Sadie's friendship's early days and Celine's decision to leave her husband to the radical movements of 90s Berkeley and navigating contemporary Hollywood--Alice and Celine's affair will test the limits of their love for Sadie and their own beliefs about power, agency, and feminism. Witty and relatable, sexy and surprising, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright's debut adult novel is a mesmerizing portrait of the inner lives of three very different women"--