Alice Sadie Celine

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, [Celine] 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. (Dec.)