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A Novel
by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
Abandoned by her mother in New York, sixteen-year-old Geraldine falls 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 the rarefied world of Manhattan privilege.
A coming-of-age tale 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.
"Unequivocally the best book I've read this year. Sarah Blakley-Cartwright's writing is elegant, painful, and funny. A mother-daughter story with all the wit and feeling of Susie Boyt's Loved and Missed. Heavy Cream nails the profound, often horrifying, experience of figuring out who you are in relation to the people who raised you." —Erin Somers, author of The Ten Year Affair
"Heavy Cream is a moving and brilliantly written novel that explores the imperfect connection between a mother and daughter and questions the role of caretaking—or lack thereof—in the formation of identity. I absolutely loved this smart, spiky story." —Camille Perri, author of Social Animals
This information about Heavy Cream was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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