Sweetener

Higgins (A Good Happy Girl) shines in this sharp-witted novel of women behaving badly. Rebecca, recently separated from her wife—a doctoral student also named Rebecca—is a part-time cashier at a local organic food market in Washington, D.C. Even though she’s broke, she just changed her status on a sugar mama dating app from “seeker to provider.” Fellow app user Charlotte, who happens to be the sugar mama of doctoral student Rebecca, has heard about cashier Rebecca and is curious to meet her, so she reaches out on the app, pretending to be a seeker. Thus begins a tangled love triangle between three women figuring out who they are to each other and themselves, especially as the Rebeccas attend parenting classes together to support doctoral student Rebecca’s desire to become a foster parent. Higgins’s characters might be a bit of a mess, but their thoughts are rendered with precision, whether in cashier Rebecca’s reflections on her unfulfilling work (“I don’t believe I’ve ever impacted a person, not even and especially not myself”) or Charlotte’s motivations for wearing a prosthetic pregnancy belly (“Charlotte makes magic happen in her mind—an understanding moves through the women, relative strangers, that her belly does make her a good person, a sweet person.... A person who deserves just a little grace”). The question of parenthood haunts the three women, like a destination without a map, and the final reveal is a knockout. Readers will have a blast. Agent: Katie Grimm, Curtis Brown. (Aug.)