minayana 's review for:

Sugar, Baby by Celine Saintclare
3.5
dark reflective medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

A debut covering themes of sex work, hypersexuality, religious trauma, and mother daughter relationships that unfortunately doesn’t go as far as it should’ve. An engaging and interesting read, but it doesn’t bring anything new to the topics it’s covering nor does it break from the standard “cliches” we’d expect from this type of premise. The writing was good but there were some typos and errors that were not caught in editing. Agnes makes a lot of decisions that directly (and almost purposefully) puts her in danger and the end result is not usually realistic to what actually would’ve happened. For a book that’s presumably about the dangers of sex work, the author was not willing to go to there. Everything seems to be touched on very superficially, and the ending wrapped up a little bit too quickly and nicely. This is very much a debut, but I can see the author coming out with some solid books in the future. I will say, I was in the perfect mood for this sort of book so I did end up actually really enjoying the reading experience even though I have many critiques (hence my good rating lol)