Milk Teeth

Product Information

Milk Teeth is absolutely gorgeous, perfectly written, emotional, poetic, sexy, heavy, draining, filling, so so so satisfying. So human, so real! Ms Andrews, are you in love with Barcelona? I think you are because you captured its SMELL, which is something that very few authors capture about cities. Yes, Barcelona has a very specific smell. Fruit, heat, sweat, piss, sea, wind, sugar, sewer, empanadas, beer, bread, chocolate. I smell this every day and I love it, I allow it to fill my body and omg, did I enjoy the descriptions of my beloved city in this book. I feel privileged. The novel begins with Lucy’s birth, “It begins with our bodies . . . Safe together in the violet dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us.” Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews was my most anticipated read of 2022, the moment I heard Andrews had written/was working on a new novel I practically squealed with excitement. When a copy of Milk Teeth was in my postbox on Friday morning I honestly felt like I’d won the lottery and had to explain to my parents who were looking at me with rather great levels of concern what this book was and why I was so worked up over it. So I’m extremely grateful to the publishers for sending this copy my way.

The unnamed female narrator of Milk Teeth, plagued by bodily shame, leaves her toxic family in Durham and travels to London, Paris and Barcelona, unable to escape her emotional demons. Told in short vignettes oscillating between the present and the past, the narrative can feel jarring, and there is a tendency towards self-indulgence that hampers the potential for emotional insight, but Andrews nonetheless explores some important issues. A girl grows up in the north of England amid scarcity, precarity and the toxic culture of heroin chic, believing that she needs to make herself smaller to claim presence in the world. Chaney’s compelling, highly readable debut delves into the history of normality. It wasn’t until 200 years ago that the word “normal” was even applied to humans: prior to that it was purely a mathematical term. But 19th-century developments in science, and the growing popularity in statistics, prompted a search for averages – and subsequently norms – in human health, experience and behaviour. Encompassing everything from sex surveys to baby weight, beauty standards to sexuality, this is a brilliantly engaging work of popular science. Orwell’s Roses It is a big deal but I don’t know how to explain it. I want you to know how integral it has been to the way I move through the world, how I learned to push shame and anger deep into by body and yet speaking about it brings it into the present, when all I want is to leave it behind. With the housing crisis, and things becoming more and more expensive, and people being pushed out, I wanted to ask the question: who are cities for? Particularly London. Obviously, it’s so exciting and it’s so culturally diverse and rich. But then in so many of the spaces you’re thinking, ‘Ok, but who are these shops for, who are these restaurants for, who are these cafes for? Because I don’t really feel like they’re for me.’TW: Food is a really important part of Milk Teeth , tied up with ideas of desire and denial. How did you land on that theme? He wanted to dance to music and to enjoy the delicate nuance of spoken language. He learned the way that putting feelings into words and out into the world could ease the pressure inside, like letting air out of a balloon." 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?

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

Product details

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 Can you write a simile?' I ask him. ‘If you had to compare pizza to something, what would you compare it to?'

I personally find this kind of writing style incredibly clumsy, ugly and embarrassing, but I am sure this will appeal to many people. I am going to meanly throw out some real clunkers here though as a taster... : A transporting, visceral second novel... a sizzling novel to read in the heat, when you're hungry for life. ― Lucy Writers Platform Through a mosaic of memory and nostalgia, we observe as our unarmed protagonist navigates both her past and present. Specifically the continual heartache and hunger that has plagued her for so long. Andrews does here what so few manage with this subject matter. Rather than just a voyeuristic description of a skipped meal, a pale complexion, or a rogue and jutting collarbone, there’s a liveliness and a reality here that’s explored in the same way it’s lived by its protagonist: overwhelmingly. There’s a delicate balance throughout the novel between the tight, restrictive control of the protagonist and the indulgence she’s attempting to embrace. This is reflected in the language, each sentence feeling like a bevy of sensation without a single word wasted. If I had to give this novel one word, it would be: sensual. You can hear the sounds of the various city environments; you can feel the somehow simultaneous discomfort and ecstasy of being embodied; most of all, the descriptions of food are so palpable as to be some of the standout linguistic passages.We lay in the wet grass in the park, catching stars on the ends of our eyelashes. My new friends said things like, 'This park has a bad heart,' or 'the sky is falling down,' and I knew what they meant, lacing my fingers through theirs and running through the lavender dawn, our long coats flying out behind us.' ha hahahahahahaaaa hahaaaaa haa what I came home from school with something bubbling beneath my blouse' (translation: I want a belly-button piercing - just weird articulation)

It begins with our bodies. Skin on skin. My body burst from yours. Safe together in the violet dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us. I am wet and glistening like a beetroot pulsing in soil. Fasting and gulping. There are wounds in your belly and welts around your nipples, puffy and purpling."From the author of the award-winning Saltwater comes a beautifully told love story set across England, France and Spain. I found this novel quite riveting. It is the story of an unnamed young woman who grew up in the North East of England. She was raised by her mother. The author captures a sense of youth, with all the mixed feelings and experiments appropriate to that age. This is a debut novel and it won the Portico Prize earlier this year. The Portico Prize is biennial and is awarded to writers from the north of England. I have read a couple of the books on the shortlist (doesn’t have to be a novel) and they have been of a good standard. This one was no exception. It is a coming of age novel, but much more. There is a focus on mother/daughter relationships, but it is also about class. The protagonist Lucy is brought up in a working class area of Sunderland: she leaves to go to university in London. Some time after graduation she goes to spend some time in her late grandfather’s cottage in Ireland. The chapters are short, often very short and not entirely linear. At times this was a minor irritation, but no more. The novel is also about divided loyalties, feeling torn: North vs South, urban vs suburban vs rural, coping with an alcoholic father, trying to fit in. There are strong women characters here, often dealing with alcoholic and unpredictable men and it runs through generations, even Lucy’s grandmother: