Book Review: Sugar, ‘Baby by Celine Saintclare

Tina Nouri-Mahdavi ‘25

Artwork courtesy of Ysabella Beatriz Chiongbian Punzalan ‘24.

★★★☆☆

Celine Saintclare’s debut novel, Sugar, ‘Baby follows a young mixed-race woman, Agnes, who feels trapped in her immigrant mother’s home in a small English town the residents dubbed “The Wasteland.” Through her cleaning job, where she works alongside her mother, Constance, she meets Emily, the white, wealthy, model daughter of one of their clients, who lures Agnes into the life of sugar babying in London. Agnes trails behind Emily, who is working on a book to instruct other women on “how to get men to do whatever you want,” and moves into her South Kensington apartment, with Emily’s three friends, diving deep into the glamorous and devastating world of high-end sex work. 

Agnes, as a character, is quite likable. She acknowledges that the world of sugar babying, for her, as someone with a much lower socioeconomic status than the other girls, holds meaning that the others wouldn’t understand. She is kind to her friends; her narration is witty a majority of the time and depressing at others, but, overall, she comes across as a relatable character. Perhaps to a fault, at times; the desperate urge for contemporary writers, especially female writers, to create a “real” character—one that could just as easily be your friend as someone whose world you are inhabiting—can lead to prose that falls flat in quality in its attempts to be conversational. Agnes’ voice sometimes veers towards just that, but at the same time, her narration is clear and provides a vivid picture of her worlds, both old and new, allowing the reader to enter it wholly. 

The story itself is compelling. It is not only a question of the ethics and moral dilemmas of high-end sex work—problems that Agnes grapples with throughout the entire novel and doesn’t seem to ever fully resolve—but also it is of the inherent economic privilege and, often, whiteness that constitutes “high-end” sex work. For Emily and her friends, sugar babying is only a pastime, a fun way to make extra money in the summertime that they do not necessarily require. For Agnes, sugar babying becomes her ticket out of the entrapment that is her hometown. She makes more money than she could ever imagine, and for her, the money is not a prize to be easily won and wasted; it is money that could change the course of her life forever. The story follows this thread among many others, spanning the duration of the summer as well as many different cities. The plot is surprising, in many ways, but predictable in others, and by the end, it felt like it led the reader nowhere. It needed more: more tension, more conclusion, more drama. While the story of her sugar babying was, indeed, full of drama, it seemed to subside easily. 

It is, however, a necessary and valuable story to be told. It is the exploration of a relatively new phase of sex work, one that seems to hold a moral high ground above that of what we know; one that is a hobby of the rich and beautiful. What does it mean, then, for Agnes to involve herself in it? What does it mean for the future of sex work if it becomes a playful choice, a pastime, something that is not done because of the necessity of survival but rather as entertainment? There is a storied history of women’s involvement in sex work, even more so of the role race plays in sex work, and there is a new history that is actively being made right now. This story is the beginning of many more documents of that history.