for some reason this one didn't really do it for me :-/ I started out really hooked - loved the voice, the setting, the build up. I didn't care for Agnes, and not in a fun unlikeable narrator kind of way unfortunately. I kept expecting a bigger character arc and it just never really went where I wanted it to go. there is still a lot I can appreciate, but it just wasn't for me I guess!

thanks netgalley for the arc!

Thank you NetGalley for a free e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Celine Saintclare's "Sugar, Baby" is an audacious and thought-provoking debut novel that delves into the world of high-paid sex work through the lens of a young mixed-race woman's journey of self-discovery. This novel, reminiscent of the bold storytelling found in "Luster" and "Queenie," explores themes of race, class, and the pursuit of fulfillment in an age dominated by the internet and materialism.

The protagonist, Agnes, is a compelling and complex character whose life is steeped in mundanity until she meets Emily, a sugar baby who introduces her to a world of luxury, glamour, and the precarious nature of relationships based on financial transactions. Saintclare portrays Agnes' transformation and descent into this lifestyle with a raw and unflinching honesty that captures the allure and the inherent dangers of this world.

One of the novel's greatest strengths is its nuanced exploration of the intersectionality of race, beauty, and class. Agnes' experiences as a mixed-race woman navigating the sugar baby lifestyle add layers of complexity to the narrative, offering sharp commentary on how societal perceptions of race and beauty shape individual experiences. The contrast between Agnes' background and that of the other sugar babies, who come from wealth and possess safety nets she lacks, is particularly poignant, highlighting the disparities in their experiences and choices.

However, the novel's unflinching portrayal of its subject matter might not resonate with all readers. The depiction of the relationships and the challenges Agnes faces can be unsettling, and the narrative's rawness and intensity require a level of engagement that may be demanding for some.

"Sugar, Baby" is an electric and original novel that does not shy away from challenging its readers. Saintclare's debut is a spellbinding exploration of a young woman's search for fulfillment in a world that often values surface over substance. The novel's compelling narrative and incisive social commentary make it a standout work, offering a fresh and critical perspective on contemporary issues. It is a must-read for those who appreciate novels that combine gripping storytelling with deep, thought-provoking themes.

Agnes doesn't have much going for her. She's living at home, scraping to make ends meet and has just been pathetically 'dumped' by her situationship. Her only friend has just gone on a months-long island getaway. Then, she meets Emily, who lives a seemingly perfect life funded by high-class benefactors, and is more than willing to take Agnes under her wing and show her the ropes. It seems perfect – Agnes gains a coven of female friendship and moves out of her home, earning thousands of dollars in the form of gifts and expensive vacations. But this life might not be as perfect for her as it seems.

Best part: How this modernizes sex work, focusing on the relationships between the women and how they support each other.
Worst part: The inconsistency of Agnes' character.

Like being dropped into the chorus of a Lana Del Rey song. This is a fast-paced drama with lots of fun characters, but the only one that isn't fun is the main character – Agnes. She grows increasingly unlikeable throughout the novel as she's a terrible friend to all of the people in her life, old and new, and never really takes agency for her actions. I never felt like I really understood her or what would actually make her happy. For people looking for something deeper out of this book – commentary on sex work or race, this doesn't really go there at all and I wouldn't recommend it for that. But for me that was fine, because it was fun! I wanted to keep reading the entire time.

Thank you to NetGalley, author Celine Saintclare, and Bloomsbury USA for providing me with a free ARC in exchange for my honest opinion!

This was a fascinating read. I don't know much about the world of sugaring relationships, so I can't speak to whether or not this is an accurate portrayal of certain things, but I enjoyed learning a bit more about how this world can work. Agnes is a complicated character, yet one that I still enjoyed reading about as the reader. There were times I wanted to boost her up and times I just wanted to give her a hug and advice. Seeing how everyone was a flawed and complicated character helped to paint the picture for how she makes her choices and moves about her world. I enjoyed Saintclare's writing, as it was magnetic and painted very vivid pictures. This was not always an easy read, but it was a mostly fun one that still had a lot of heart and reflection within.

Impressive debut! Agnes lives with her extremely religious mother in London. She has perfected lying and sneaking to enjoy the club scene with her friends after spending her long hard days cleaning people’s houses. When she meets Emily, the daughter of one of her cleaning clients, she is introduced to a lifestyle of making more money than she can imagine as a “Sugar Baby”. Agnes is seduced by the expensive clothes, fancy dinners and the power she discovers as a beautiful young woman. But Agnes experiences a complicated journey of self discovery as she dives deeper into this dark and sordid new way of life. Thank you Netgalley, Bloomsbury USA and the author for this eARC in exchange for my honest review. This book will be available for purchase on January 9, 2024

Our fmc, Agnes, has been brought up by a devout religious mother and from the beginning of the story struggles with her place in the world. Quite unintentionally , she meets and becomes pulled into a world of models and sugar babies (younger women who provide romantic companionship or sexual intimacy to generally older men in exchange for gifts/money etc). As Agnes’ decisions lead her deeper into this life and further from her family and their beliefs, Agnes must decide what she really believes about herself and the world.

This book explores themes of family, identity, religion, the value of women in society, and more. As a former religious kid myself, I saw much of myself in Agnes’ struggle with her beliefs and the guilt that comes even when we don’t agree with its premise.

I enjoyed the realness of Agnes’ character and experiencing her thoughts and reactions as a flawed character. I found her lovable even when I questioned her decisions because it seemed authentic to personhood, to the choices we make when we feel stuck, or like we’ve already ruined everything.

While it’s true that the book could’ve dove in further to racism, classism, and sex work as a valid trade, I think it gave a good introduction to readers who may not have been familiar with this world. What was brought up for with the story the author was telling.

This book was dark, and challenging to read at times because it hurt my heart. That said, it was fabulous!
4.25 stars.

Dang. I'm so sad. I really wanted to like this one, but it just wasn't for me. I couldn't get past all of the mumbo-jumbo in the first couple of chapters, so I had to let it go.

TW: rape, drug abuse

Agnes is. 21 one year old daughter of an overbearing, religious mother. Despite her mother’s hovering, Agnes has an secret, active sex and social life when she meets the flawless Emily, who introduces her to the world of sugaring. Propelled by her abandonment issues and feelings of inadequacy, Agnes’ beauty and sexual prowess has her globetrotting with dark results. Her saving grace is her love of her sister, Marlena, and her love of photography. This book was amazing and I found myself having to pause out of fear and frustration with Agnes, hoping she would be OK as I turned the page. Womanhood comes with challenges no matter how we try to navigate it, as Celine Saintclair has shown with such dazzling clarity.

Sugar, Baby was a gripping take on the world of sugar dating. I couldn't put this book down because I needed to know what was going to happen to Agnes. This was a great coming-of-age story about power, beauty, and danger for fans of Luster.

This debut novel follows 21-year-old Agnes Green, a mixed-race, sixth-form drop-out, stagnant in life as she works as a cleaner for wealthy clientele beside her devoutly religious, immigrant mother. Agnes is engaged in a constant dance of lies, hiding the truth of her messy social life while she lives under her mother’s strict roof. That is until the beautiful daughter of one of the rich families Agnes cleans for decides to take our guilt-ridden MC under her wing to teach her the ways of “sugaring”, alongside her three roommates. Agnes barely hesitates at the offer of maximum money for minimum time, a brand new life of luxury.

The first half of this novel is a breeze to get through; fast-paced, occasionally rich sentences that are easily digestible, and the looming assurance that things are most certainly going to go off the rails.

However, somewhere at the mid-mark of the novel things turn foreign, erratic, and downright frustrating — but not in the good way. It felt rushed and unpolished.

There are a lot of themes touched upon in the book: classism, religious trauma, sex work, social judgment, racism— but I found myself disappointed that the majority of said topics are just that: a touch. A brief mention. A brief musing that isn’t fully delved into. I was hoping for a fresh take on a sugar baby, but it just didn’t meet that mark for me. I have a handful of issues with the text that I can probably sum up just by saying: I wanted more. I wanted to know more about the lives behind the characters, most specifically the models, who are constantly hinted at having deeper feelings but never brought to the surface. If Agnes really wanted to be an artist, I wanted more of that spread throughout the book. I wanted more empathy for sex workers, and, ironically, less judgement.

If you stay surface level, read it as it is for what it is, I would dare to say you’ll enjoy — just don’t pick it apart too much because it will easily unravel.

A wonderful debut! This book made me think of Luster. I enjoyed this book a lot. It takes you into the world of escorting, but in a gentle and very respectful way. I thought this was a brilliant debut.

This book lost it's way very early into the beginning and became hard to follow. Thankfully, Agnes was a well written character within a flurry of confusing side characters and endless plot holes.

Agnes Green is bored with her life, living as a cleaner in a small town in England with her religious mother and few friends. An encounter with a beautiful girl whose house she is cleaning leads to Agnes embracing a lifestyle called "sugar babying", something that ultimately pans out to being very similar to being an escort. I found this book to be interesting and the plot moves along quickly, but I didn't think the protagonist's actions made sense a lot of the time. The conflicts within the book fell a bit flat for me, with Agnes not seeming to have more than a shallow understanding of herself and the people around her. The book really excels in the scenery, everything is very vivid and well described, easy to get immersed into the world Agnes is living in.

I ate this book up! This is one of those books you never want to put down. The story was intense, glamorous, sexy, dirty, shameful, exciting and SO much more. Pretty much you get lots of feels while reading this.
I loved our main character Agnes and Emily was also fantastically done. All of our other characters were also perfect for their parts.
I really didn’t want this book to end, but also wanted Agnes to get off the crazy train ride she was on. You definitely route for her and find yourself making excuses for her wild behavior because you feel for her so much.
This was such an entertaining and enlightening book. I will be very interested to see what else this author will write!
Thank you NetGalley and Celine Saintclare for my free copy, I am leaving my unbiased opinion!

3.5, rounded up to 4 stars. Sugar, Baby was, at the bottom line, a very enjoyable read. Celine Saintclare's prose is simple but hypnotic in a way that makes it difficult to put down, and lends a sort of real-yet-unreal atmosphere to the novel that perfectly fits the narrative. Agnes is a character that I longed to root for even as she made mistakes that made me cringe inside. However, I'm not quite sure Sugar, Baby is much else. I came away feeling like I'd gotten a deep, intimate look at Agnes's experiences as a high-paid "sugar baby" and her subsequent moral quandaries and conflicts, but only that. The "message" of the novel seemed, to me, to be things that literally any woman in the modern age understands, and Sugar, Baby didn't really offer anything more. I wish there had been more development of or focus on Agnes's relationship with her mother, perhaps a deeper exploration of how the relationship between a mother and daughter can shape the daughter's self-perception and sexuality. Alas, like sugar, Sugar, Baby was an ephemeral treat, a delight to read but lacking the substance to leave a lasting impression.

Thank you Bloomsbury Publishing for my Netgalley copy of SUGAR, BABY by Celine Saintclare, out 1/9/24!

For fans of Luster and Queenie, this novel is an unflinching portrayal of high-paid sex work in the age of the Internet. It follows Agnes, a mixed 21-year old whose life seeminly leads to nowhere. Living and working with her religious mother, she spends all her money in clubs on the weekends with her friends she feels disconnected from, looking for distractions from every day life.

The difference Agnes soon learns is the sugar babies around her come from money. She soon falls deeper and deeper in the hands of men who realize she doesn’t have the same safety net the other women do. Agnes starts to search for fulfillment and stems further and further from the faith that kept her grounded as she sought out her purpose.

This is a gorgeous coming-of-age story, very hard to read at times, with smart commentary on race, beauty and class in London. I think we needed more of Agnes’ back story leading up to her decision to engulf herself in sex work to truly understand her grapplings - sometimes I felt the novel fell to stereotypes and questions of morality. I don’t think there was anything new in this novel regarding sex work (I think of my time reading Revolting Prositutes), until we get to the part where Agnes goes to Miami with a billionaire and his wife (this part I found to be the most intriguing, with the most thematic moments).

I expected more social media connections in the novel showing the modernization of sex work - more instagram DM’s, OnlyFans, Twitter porn, RedBook, Snapcash, shadowbanning… it seemed social media was mostly used as a diary to promote her lavish lifestyle than showcase how it pampers to the industry.

I guess I wanted more! I’m wondering how much was autofiction and what was researched. The writing is stellar and I very much enjoyed the book - I was just left wanting a little bit more.

"Sugar, Baby" presents a compelling narrative centered around Agnes, a 21-year-old seeking liberation from her repressive religious upbringing. Her journey unfolds as she becomes intertwined with Emily, the daughter of her former employer, plunging headlong into a world of glamour and companionship.

While the premise held immense promise, I must admit that I encountered some difficulty in fully immersing myself in the story due to the prose. The writing style, at times, seemed lacking. I had hoped for a more immersive exploration of themes like race, class, and the multifaceted aspects of sex work, which the book's premise seemed to promise.

Nonetheless, the dynamic between Agnes and Emily, as well as the backdrop of Agnes' escape from her restrictive past, added layers of complexity to the story. The concept of Agnes breaking free from her religious confines to embrace a glittering yet uncertain path was what drew me in initially. The exploration of Agnes' choices and the challenges she faces while navigating her newfound friendship in this world of opulence has its own allure.

In terms of the thematic content, I found myself wanting more depth. The book hinted at the potential for insightful reflections on race, class dynamics, and the multifaceted nature of sex work. However, I felt that these elements were not as intricately woven into the narrative as I had anticipated. A more profound exploration of these themes could have elevated the story, allowing readers to engage on a deeper level with the characters' experiences.

I initially found the premise intriguing but wasn't a fan of the slow pace and the voice. Just not for me.

I absolutely loved this! The writing was delectable and the story was incredibly gripping. I couldn't put this book down, as just like the main character, I was drawn into this world of glamour, but also of danger and disrespect. A nuanced take on sex work and the sacrifices made in that world.

Also LOVE both the US and UK covers!