Earlier this year, I read and enjoyed Jessica Andrews’s first novel, Saltwater. I said then that I looked forward to reading her second novel, Milk Teeth, and here we are.

I thought the first novel was particularly good on the sense of ‘otherness’ that people from the North often feel when they are in London. This novel channeled similar feelings but on a bigger canvas: instead of London, our female northern protagonist finds herself in Barcelona and Paris. The slightly disorientating non-chronological structure is back, as is Andrews’s brilliant, lyrical writing. Milk Teeth is both a love story and a coming-of-age story. It examines how relationships can help us grow, but how those same relationships shift as the people within them change.

As with the first book, I found the writing to be superior to the plot—although this time round, the plot was pretty engaging on its own terms. I found the main character’s descriptions of her relationship with food to be interesting and insightful. This relationship was a recurring theme through the book, perhaps reflecting the coming-of-age aspect of the novel.

I really enjoyed this, and won’t hesitate to pick up Andrews’s next novel.

A couple of quotations I noted down:

I bathe my knee carefully with a pan of warm water, wiping away dust. There is a big chunk of grit trapped beneath the skin and I dig it out carefully with a small twist, like a loose milk tooth wrenched from a gum, and it leaves a tiny wet hole. I roll it between my fingers and wonder how long I might have carried it around, if I had not noticed it. I imagine my skin healing, growing over the stone, sealing it inside me. I wonder if it would have got infected, or whether my body would break it down. Maybe I would have just carried it for the rest of my life, without even knowing it was there.

I didn’t know how to explain to you that I want wanted sensation, beauty and chaos but I had to swallow my basic needs so I could meet my wants because they were bigger than I could afford. I wanted to go beyond the borders of the life that was set out for me, to stand on the threshold and see the world beyond it, but stepping off the edge came with a cost I did not anticipate. I want to inhabit a space with ease, somewhere airy and light with room to grow into. I want to be part of the world instead of just skirting the edges, to feel deserving of love and care. I want to hold onto the good things tightly, to learn what it means to stay.

This 2019 coming-of-age novel is narrated by Lucy. She grows up in a working-class household in Sunderland, goes to university in London, and moves to rural Ireland following her graduation.

The novel is written in fragments which are mostly, but not completely, arranged chronologically. The style reminded me a lot of Jenny Offill’s novels, though I found Andrews’s writing more immediately relatable.

This is Andrews’s first novel, though she has published another since. Her writing is beautiful, almost poetic at times. I think she captures particularly well the North/South relationship, and the way that people from the North are often “othered” in London.

Andrews is also good at needling the class divide and the different frames of reference privilege brings: there is one closely observed section where she is challenged about working in a bar while also preparing for her A-Levels.

I wasn’t completely won over by the plot of this novel: it’s a coming-of-age novel, and I’m uncertain whether I got the sense that the character was really developing. There was a whole plot about Lucy’s relationship with her father that seemed designed to do the heavy lifting on this, but felt a bit ‘tacked on’ to me.

However, I was so thoroughly taken with the writing that I didn’t honestly mind about the rest, and I’ll certainly look out for Andrews’s second book.

Some particularly striking quotations from Saltwater:

London is built on money and ambition, and I didn’t have enough of either of those things.

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 politicians and bankers. 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.

High-rise tower blocks and the despondency of stale, squat houses are aesthetically pleasing when you are removed from them. Middle-class architects with utopian ideals might be able to appreciate the solidity and the magnitude of a huge hunk of concrete with lives carved unapologetically into it, but when that becomes your reality and you have no choice and no way out, when you’re living every day under the shadow of someone else’s vision, it becomes oppressive, the weight of their dreams crushing the life out of you.

Many thanks to Newcastle City Library for lending me a copy of this book.