“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.
The novel flits between the past in glitzy Bishop Auckland (the unnamed protagonist and her peers scarred by the body-shaming headlines of the 2000s), her move to London, a brief spell in Paris, and romance in the present, which, after the student lands a research position, sends her to Barcelona.
Food is a fixation for the working-class narrator and the prose is studded with decadent images ( “figs laid out like a tray of soft bruises”, skies “the colour of watermelon flesh”). In fact, most of Milk Teeth’s crucial moments unfold over meals. 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.
Following in the footsteps of Andrews’ debut, the Portico Prize-winning Saltwater, Milk Teeth elaborates on similar themes: surviving the clamour of the city; being defined by one’s body; and class and background curbing opportunity. This tender love story, however, contemplates the possibility of agency in a world where systemic oppression and individual impulse are the ruling forces.
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In Saltwater Andrews sought a voice that is her own, something she has truly settled into in Milk Teeth. Addressed in second person to the narrator’s lover, the writing is gilded with a vulnerable immediacy, blisteringly honest and visceral. Andrews, already lauded, has come into her own.
