Milk Teeth
Jennifer Calleja
(Translator)
Description
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.
Product Details
| Publisher | Unnamed Press |
| Publish Date | September 20, 2021 |
| Pages | 223 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781951213350 |
| Dimensions | 8.1 X 5.1 X 0.9 inches | 0.7 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
the soul. It asks introspection of us, drawing attention to the
cataclysms that daunt our own world even through the imagined, fictive
realm. It advocates for responsibility instead of blindness, knowledge
instead of ignorance, and in the realization of the fact that there may
no longer be easy answers for our problems, it holds up a mirror so that
we may confront our worst instincts."
--Anna Rumsby, Asymptote Journal
"Milk Teeth makes for a bravura read. It's at once a harrowing
example of climate fiction and a work about a small community in
isolation--a book that feels plausibly speculative and that plays out
with the occasionally nightmarish logic of a fable. Even so, the
psychology of Bukowski's characters feels thoroughly realistic, and that
in turn gives this novel even more power. Can a novel feel both
inevitable and unpredictable? This one pulls it off." --Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders
"Bukowski's dystopia is at once vivid and ominous... Bukowski confronts daunting issues but never gives in to despair.
Ultimately, her debut succeeds because it's populated by characters who
feel authentic--people who are duly frightened yet heroically normal in
the face of cascading crises." --Kevin Canfield, Words Without Borders
"In Milk Teeth, Helene Bukowski has created a world as eerie,
unsettling and immersive as that of Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream.
Her prose is as spare as the climate-change dystopia she depicts: harsh,
unforgiving, and rife with social tension--but dotted with pockets of
care. Come for the propulsive mystery, stay for the tenderness pulsing
underneath it."
--Jessica Gross, author of Hysteria
"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
"With dashes of folk horror, cli-fi, and post-apocalyptic influences, Bukowski crafts a narrative that is somehow both propulsive and elegantly spare. A memorable entry into the dystopian-literature canon from a young German writer to watch." --Kirkus Reviews
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