Milk Teeth

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Milk Teeth is“a love story about the joy and terror of taking risks and finding a way to feel deserving of love,”Sceptresaid.“Through Jessica Andrews’ vivid and lyrical prose, we embark on a tender, painful exploration of what it means to understand ourselves and the things we truly want in life. Growing up in the north of England amid scarcity, precarity and the toxic culture of heroin chic, the heroine of Milk Teeth believes she needs to make herself smaller to claim presence in the world. 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? What will make or break it for each individual reader is our response to the prose - for me, it's laboured, try-hard, pseudo-poetic that prioritizes pretty combinations of words over meaning; others may find it lyrical: 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: 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.

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. I needed to learn how to look at the woman inside me without flinching, learn how to feed her and care for her, to recognise her as me.”Like many girls from my generation, raised on a diet of Arturo Bandini's oranges and shiny tinned dreams of post-feminism, I have wasted too many years trying to fit into small, muted spaces. I would rather sit down to eat and think with Jessica Andrews any day: Milk Teeth is a novel about holding space, and the hard work that it takes. It is true and I am so grateful it exists . What a relief it is, finally, to step off the ledge: to choose to adventure, to give and take care. -- Livia Franchini Unnamed protagonist with body image issues is remembering her past life and is now over-analyzing her current one.

Jessica Andrews's first novel, Saltwater, was wonderful. The follow-up, Milk Teeth, is even better' Alex Preston, Observer The book is heavy with heartbreak, loneliness, want and desire, but there's plenty of love and positivity too. TW: There’s a strong sense of place in both books, and Milk Teeth spans the north of England, London, Paris, and Barcelona. How did you approach the setting of this book? If you enjoy a book in which every other sentence is an overwritten flowery, cheesy metaphor or simile, then this is the one for you.

Customer reviews

The novel is full of these astute, powerful, gut-wrenching overviews in which the protagonist cements her alien-ness whilst creating a sense of collaborative, uncomfortable marriage between privilege and consumption. The narrator’s resentment towards her hunger is due to its uncontrollability, its unquenchability. It’s easy to feel like hunger is the enemy when you’re unsure if, how, or when it will be satiated. 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.” JA: I can only speak from my own experience, but there are two edges to it. If you do feel like an outsider in certain spaces, because of systemic problems, if you don’t have the language to understand or articulate those systemic problems, you internalise it, right? It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m wrong, I’m weird, I don’t fit in.’ All of that gets turned in on you, to make you feel like you’re not really deserving of things. But then on the other side, I was thinking a lot about the messaging around my own teenage years. I was a teenager in the early 2000s, and it was the whole size zero, Kate Moss, heroin chic sort of vibe. I think the language and the rhetoric around that time was always about diminishing yourself and making yourself smaller. And there was a very self-destructive ethos around that time. Pop culture was Skins or The Libertines, and it was all about taking loads of drugs and doing wild things all the time. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

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 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. It’s very rare in my reading that I’d describe a novel, or any work of literature, as ‘insatiable.’ Something that feels greedy, rapacious, in its demand for both your attention and the full spectrum of your emotional intellect.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. Andrews deftly covers the toxic diet and body culture of the early 2000s with our young protagonist, who, for most of her life, has been subjected to this culture from magazines, television shows, friends and family in her life etc. There are some really interesting themes - the feelings of a shared identity when a relationship deepens - how do we share our lives but separate our beings? And there is also plenty of chilling nostalgia around the industrialised body shaming, diet culture and magazine headlines from the mid 00s. The notion that taking up space (both literally, physically, and metaphorically through opinions and advocating for yourself) is a radical act and a really hard one to master after years of being told by society that you have to change yourself to be worthy, is really powerful. I loved a phrase used which was that our protagonist is desperately trying to be a person who is “unafraid of pleasure” I am wet and glistening like a beetroot pulsing in soil' (yeah but is beetroot wet when it's in the earth? I'd be pretty worried if it pulsed...)

regarding how Lucy would use the Shard as a landmark to orient herself in the city] "I feel an affinity with the Shard, even though it is a symbol of the wealth and status I am so far removed from."

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The heat of Barcelona and the warmth of the romance and emotions between our two main characters juxtapose so well with the coldness of London and the fear and loneliness felt as well as the sadness, anxiety and negative but entirely overpowering view and perception of food, body image, and eating. Addictive, immediate, brilliant . Jessica Andrews offers a profound take on the ways our bodies are policed, on class, escapism and losing yourself in others -- Helen Mort