Milk Teeth
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Like Sophie Macintosh in The Water Cure or Diane Cook in The New Wilderness, Helene Bukowski imagines a pocket landscape where the concerns of our world can be contained and considered, a defamiliarized place that skews increasingly uncanny without ever becoming unrecognizable. Written with precision and poise, Milk Teeth is a moving depiction of survival and perseverance, and of how we might choose new families and communities in the face of an increasingly hostile world." —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
Skalde writes her thoughts on pieces of paper, making new discoveries and revelations, and finding scraps with which to understand her limited world. Her mother Edith tells her little, preferring the solitude of her room. Their house is full of silence, and secrets.
Skalde has only ever known life in the territory, a terrain of farms and forest cut off from the rest of the world. They are isolated further, as decades since Edith’s arrival in the territory she is still viewed as an outsider by their remaining neighbors. A heavy fog hangs over the territory, Skalde has never seen blue in the sky her entire childhood― but one day the fog dissipates, and is replaced by an oppressive, perpetual heat. The territory dries out, and its people become increasingly erratic, and desperate.
When Skalde finds a girl called Meisis in the forest, Skalde instantly feels she must care for her and brings her in. They form a family unit, in spite of Skalde’s increasing frustrations and anger with Edith and the urgent need to keep Meisis hidden. Meisis’s presence means there has been a serious breach in security for the territory, and soon neighbors find a way to blame Meisis’s arrival on other changes.
Beautifully written in immersive, spare prose, Helene Bukowski’s debut novel is about what it means to care for one another at the end of the world, about living with the impacts of climate change, and nationalism and the way we view “outsiders.” Jen Calleja’s translation from German is a lively rendition of this modern-day fairytale, of three women living on the brink.
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In Bukowski's gripping debut, a woman attempts to raise a child in a near future dramatically altered by climate change. People's bodies have changed, too. Austere Edith, fully grown, still has "milk teeth," or baby teeth. She lives with her daughter Skalde in a withered landscape in what seems to be total solitude— until it's revealed that neighbors do exist, and are hostile. The neighbors' distrust of Edith and Skalde increases when Skalde, now in her teens, takes in a child named Meisis she finds in the forest, who appears to be at the age when she would expect to lose her milk teeth. The girl's arrival and her red hair, which is alien to the small and highly isolated community, prompts a series of disputes among the superstitious members, who blame Meisis's arrival for the disappearance of two girls from the community. As Skalde's attachment to Meisis grows, she makes a life-changing decision. The narrative is reliably tense if sometimes overheated with red herrings that add suspense without driving the plot, and Bukowski's surreal descriptions of the landscape are exceptional ("The fog has swallowed up the sea. It stands like a wall, there, where the beach begins"). There's no shortage of climate fiction these days, but this one is distinguished by its striking vision.