"In this arresting and offbeat coming-of-age novel from Blakley-Cartwright, a 16-year-old girl leaves her vagabond life in California for the East Coast... it’s a fresh story of female resilience."
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Smart, edgy, and emotionally astute."
—OPRAH DAILY'S Best Books of Fall
"A tale of teenage resilience that shows how choices made by adults determine what younger generations have to endure."
—BOOKLIST
Description
“A magic spell of a book.” —Julie Buntin
“Heavy Cream is funny, deeply felt, and positively effervescent, brimming with life and color and texture—I was repeatedly struck by its humor, its compassion, and its candor.” —Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
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, in this “wildly perceptive” (Stefan Merrill Block, New York Times bestselling author of Homeschooled) coming-of-age story from the bestselling author of Alice Sadie Celine.
For Gerry, growing up on the road has always been her mother and her, locked in dysfunction. Homeschooled, she 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 and 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, she 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 story that explores unconventional forms of motherhood and caretaking, Heavy Cream 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.
Reviews
"Heavy Cream is a mesmerizing novel about the intoxicating, impossible bond between a mother and daughter, told in prose that is at once razor-sharp, funny, and devastating. Sarah Blakley-Cartwright captures the way love and manipulation become indistinguishable, refusing easy villains or simple redemption. It's a tender and complicated portrait of inheritance, identity, and the impossible work of becoming yourself."
—Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
"Gerry's voice is addictive, a keen observer of everyone and everything, except, in the way of all great first-person narrators, herself, particularly how her love and longing for her mother shapes her choices. This story of mothers and daughters and the lengths we will go to find—or make—a home, is one of the most effervescent, complex coming-of-age stories I've read in years. A magic spell of a book."
—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena and Famous Men
"Heavy Cream is a lively, knotted, fun and funny, and also deeply felt, exploration of loving and being loved as one thrilling, complicated young woman attempts to make sense of who she is. How does a daughter form in the shadow of an absent mother; when given a klatch of other not quite mothers to choose from, all with their own draws and flaws and motives, how and why and who does she choose to become?"
—Lynn Steger Strong, author of Flight, Want, and Hold Still
"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
