Milk Teeth

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I’m not gonna drop the horse talk because I don’t know where that’s come from and I’m also scared of horses.

In lyric dispatches, with the condensed cadences of poetry, Andrews' novel brilliantly explores the ways we grow into and beyond the limits of ourselves, and what happens in the gaps in between who we are and who we're expected to be. With unironic uses of stars and constellations that propel plot and navigate our narrator, I'm not quite sure how many filtered sunsets I needed to read through to get to any meaning whatsover. The food descriptions sound tempting, so also a book which makes one hungry as well (that part’s always welcome).Addressed in second person to the narrator's lover, the writing is gilded with a vulnerable immediacy, blisteringly honest and visceral. I am so impressed that I want to read everything Andrews has ever written - I have Saltwater downloaded as an audiobook, and it's now bumped up the priority list. Of all the senses, it is taste that is evoked the most, descriptions of food a sustained motif throughout as the protagonist battles with her own discomfort with eating, the learned feeling that to restrain oneself is commendable, and grows to embrace a different relationship with appetite, through food cooked for, and by, her new partner, and through the offerings of Barcelona – small plates of tapas, tinned peaches on the beach, breakfast pastries, barbequed calçots at a barrio street party. A sense of hunger and desire starts here, in her hometown, as she describes how she ‘wanted sensation, to go out in the world and let it rip through me’.

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. Themes of loneliness, belonging, identity and love - and how we're ultimately deserving of it - will both break and warm your heart. How appropriate, then, that Jessica Andrews’ second novel, Milk Teeth, (the follow-up to her much-lauded 2019 debut Saltwater) can be described in such a way. 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 . Across its blissfully sprawling passages detailing scenes from different cities, what anchors the novel is its exploration of how hunger, class, desire and gender are interlaced .As Helen Gremillion has noted, anorexia nervosa has ‘been described almost exclusively as a white, middle-class phenomenon’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

In the sticky Mediterranean heat, among tropical plants and secluded beaches, she must decide what form her adult life should take and learn how to feel deserving of love and care. It explores what happens when she is confronted with a relationship and an existence that allows her to unfurl, to be vulnerable, to grow into a space in which it is okay to feel hunger and sate it, okay to have needs and expect those needs to be met. the key themes were body image and diet culture, sexuality, identity and coming to terms with who you are and what you want.

Our protagonist observes the other freelancers she works with, sipping coffee, eating expensive pastries, complaining about their treatment in a banal, half hearted manner. Years later, living in tiny rented rooms and working in noisy bars across London and Paris, she meets someone who offers her a new way to experience the world. I think what I mean is, there were certain passages that felt slight too navel gazing and, dare I say it, overly written? so honest and hopeful' Financial TimesA girl grows up in the north-east of England amid scarcity, fearing her own desires and feeling undeserving of love.

A book hasn’t tugged on my heart like this since Open Water - if you’re a fan of Open Water then I can almost guarantee you’ll adore Milk Teeth as well.Their relationship takes her from London to Barcelona and the precipice of a new life, full of sensuality.