Milk Teeth

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They walked around the streets in the cold, trying to stay wrapped up in the orange fur that pulsed from the street lights. When enough time had passed, my grandmother took them home and they crept up the stairs, being careful not to wake him as he snored on the settee with his mouth open.” I would like to have something to believe in, but it is difficult. Everything my generation was promised got blown away like clouds of smoke curling from the ends of cigarettes in the mouths of bankers and politicians. It is hard not to be cynical and critical of everything, and yet perhaps there is an opening, too. When the present begins to fracture, there is room for the future to be written.” 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. 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: 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

But once she gets there Lucy can’t help feeling that the big city isn’t for her, and once again she is striving, only this time it’s for the right words, the right clothes, the right foods. No matter what she tries she’s not right. Until she is. In that last year of her degree the city opens up to her, she is saying the right things, doing the right things. Until her parents visit for her graduation and events show her that her life has always been about pretending and now she’s lost all sense of who she is and what she’s supposed to be doing. It’s set in the early pre social media explosion of 2000’s. It’s easy to forget in our World that toxic diet & body cultures way pre date the Internet. You only have to read The Edible Woman @margaretatwood published in 1969 to know this is true. In the world of this book our protagonist has read & consumed a constant diet of magazines, TV shows, opinions from friends & family.

I would've definitely appreciated this when I was younger, but there's still a small part of my soft-grunge early internet self that appreciates works of art like this, style over substance, early Sofia Coppola films that erect emotions out of the mundane. You know the ending could've came sooner, but you were there for the vibes because you have your tote bag docs cold brew latte Koss Porta Pro headphones and that one Cigarettes After Sex song on loop that EVERYONE knows but you FEEL more than anyone and you have sTyLe but in actuality look like your entire Tiktok fyp. Portico Prize-winning author Jessica AndrewsSceptrehas written a second novel, Milk Teeth, forSceptre. I have always felt like other people have more right to a space than I do, as though I am not quite the right shape,” muses the 28-year-old narrator of Jessica Andrews’ second novel Milk Teeth, while weaving between imposing landmarks in London. The little stability life in the city holds — hurled between pub shifts and parties — is about to be derailed by a charmingly dishevelled student, though his ease of passage through life in contrast to her own heralds trouble. 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.” How do we learn to take up space? Why might we deny ourselves good things? Milk Teeth is a story of desire and the body, shame and joy. In vivid and lyrical prose, and with deep compassion, Jessica Andrews examines what it means to allow ourselves to live.

I liked it very much . . . the language, the prose, is very rich . . . there was a melody to it, I found myself reading passages aloud as if there was a poetry to it. -- Agnès Poirier ― BBC Radio 4 Front Row From the author of the award-winning Saltwater comes a beautifully told love story set across England, France and Spain.

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