Reviews

Sugar, Baby by Celine Saintclare

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imogenrose97's review against another edition

dark emotional sad tense

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

A quick read punctuated by trauma and fear of God, I couldn't help but feel an underlying sense that the author held sex work in quite a negative light due to Anges's internal monologue and the treatment of beauty as currency (which I agree that it is and that if you've got it you better fucking use it because the downsides of beauty warrant the upsides being as good as they can possibly be because the downsides are bad). It's hard to tell if that was unintentional.
Our protagonist was stunning and sweet and needed so much therapy. The first chapters felt like living a dream, new friends, community, softness and an escape from the claustrophobia of small town life. And most importantly freedom from an overbearing religious mother who doesn't understand that God is not a cure all magic tincture.
The relationship with her home and mother felt odd to me, I felt that someone who grew up in that environment wouldn't feel the homesickness of it so quickly. However, it is easy to forget the small pains and dream that the past wasn't so bad, that there were good intentions at the heart. For it to have felt real to me more distance needed to be put between the then and the now.
I enjoyed the frolicking, the release that comes with money after being broke, the gifts of previously unimaginable items. It was easy to know it would come crashing down, but it came down in a gentle way, an easy close.

triiiishaaa's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

sophdickinson's review against another edition

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2.75

Thanks so much to netgalley & the publishers for providing me with an advance copy of this book!

After all the hype around Sugar, Baby online, I was super excited to get around to reading it but it sadly didn’t meet my expectations. I ended up eating this a 2.75 - which I think I’m in the minority with!!

This book felt extremely false and very affected to me. We follow Agnes, a young Black woman who works with her deeply religious mother, who is a cleaner. She meets Emily, the daughter of one of her cleaning clients, who uses her as a kind of project to test out her new theories on. She’s writing a book - essentially a ‘how to get men to adore you’ guide - and wants to introduce agnes to the world of sugaring and see just how easily a total outsider from an entirely different walk of life can assimilate into this world.

Sounds great, right? However, this project seems to be entirely ditched after its first mention. Agnes just enters this highly fashionable, idealised life and there’s no real buildup to her involvement. She embodies the persona of the vixen, whilst Emily is more of a princess character - these are, imo, really reductive and a bit of a cliched view of sex workers and sugar babies. It seemed to me that all the labels, all the traditional things we might expect, existed at large within this book. And it’s a shame because it had the potential to really look at this with a critical and resonant eye, but it didn’t. There’s the entire religious background Agnes comes from, which, whilst it kind of takes centre stage, never really comes to fruition - it crops up when convenient to show that Agnes doesn’t just fall into this life with ease, but there’s no real reflection of crisis of faith which we would expect, and would’ve given this more depth. Don’t get me started on the st agnes story at the end, which really seemed just too convenient to tie up the book.

There’s a sub plot where Agnes creates an instagram account to anonymously document the sugaring lifestyle - this seemed pulled from a pinterest ‘coquette’ board, but I liked the idea enough. All we heard was ‘there were a few posts, then it all went bad’ essentially. It would’ve been so interesting to hear the how and why of this, the affects documenting sugaring had on agnes and maybe how it contributed to her love of photography - or does her dream to be a photographer only fall in conveniently when Agnes needs something to do in the novel.

All in, the story became far too convoluted and unrealistic for me to follow - I think even being swept up in the glamour of this lifestyle, the trip Agnes makes with Sergei and his wife is insanely unrealistic and too all-absorbing. Why does she seem to have zero contact with the outside world during this time? She speaks to none of the girls she’s grown so fond of in London. It’s just unrealistic and didn’t reasonable with me on the whole as a novel, unfortunately.