Milk Teeth

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This book comes lauded with acclaim about its freshness, voice and vision - but, you know, it's just that old, old story of a girl struggling to become an adult and to find her place in the world. There can still be mileage in this theme but this book hits all the predictable milestones : wayward bodies, boys, sex, struggling not to be objectified, pigeon-holed by class and accent, the push-pull of mother-daughter relationships, wanting to be separate and individual while wanting to belong. Jessica Andrews's first novel, Saltwater , was wonderful. The follow-up, Milk Teeth , is even better. A story of young love and desire that's full of the most gorgeous writing. -- Alex Preston, Fiction to Look Out for in 2022 ― Observer For now our secrets are only ours. You press me to your chest and I am you and I am not you and we will not always belong to each other but for now it is us and here it is quiet. I rise and fall with your breath in this bed. We are safe in the pink together.” Also, it felt really important to write a book that had positive sex between a man and a woman in it. A lot of the books I read are about trauma and rape and sexual abuse. And while it’s really important that we have those conversations, I feel like there’s not much representation of positive sexual experiences. If we only have the trauma, and we don’t have the positive things as well, then how do we really move on from it, because then do you not feel afraid, and do you not feel hurt, and do you not feel scared? Jessica Andrews's first novel, Saltwater , was wonderful. The follow-up, Milk Teeth , is even better' Alex Preston, Observer

A girl grows up in the north-east of England amid scarcity, precarity and a toxic culture of bodily shame,certain that she must make herself ever smaller to be loved.This confidence in her material - in placing centre stage a young, unnamed northern woman living a precarious existence but struggling to carve out more space for herself - makes her work reminiscent of Gwendoline Riley . . . unusually raw . . . so honest and hopeful. -- Alex Peake-Tomkinson ― Financial Times He thinks for a while, chewing the end of his pen. ‘Pizza is like a soft, warm bed,' he writes, and I smile. I went into this with high hopes and I have to say, I was not disappointed. Jessica Andrews strikes again 😍 Anyway, moving past the atrocious writing, another thing that grated is the cruelly stereotypical portrayal of the Irish - regarding the narrator's grandfather's childhood in Ireland, after establishing that he slept in his aunt's barn, this paragraph is, quite literally, the only information we receive about that period in his life: The book is heavy with heartbreak, loneliness, want and desire, but there's plenty of love and positivity too.

Her struggles as she juggles thoughts about herself, her body, and questioning will people genuinely want to love her for herself or purely on how she looks are painfully and realistically portrayed. Unnamed protagonist with body image issues is remembering her past life and is now over-analyzing her current one.

Andrews acutely honed in on the contradictory ways in which you can think (key part here being “think”) you are in control of your body, life, food etc. When in reality, you could not be further from it. This is a first person coming-of-age story of Lucy, who becomes curious at a young age at how “language might capture emotions.” There's the few words of grief as her loving but alcoholic father