Saltwater - Jessica Andrews

‘It is not enough to be pretty and I am not clever enough and it is not enough to be clever and I am not pretty enough.’

Saltwater is a book that has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while now and with Jessica Andrews’ next book Milk Teeth being published within a matter of months, I thought it was about time I delved into Andrew’s world to see why her debut was loved by so many.

SYNOPSIS: Lucy is lost. Growing up in the north east she wanted more. But once she gets to London, Lucy can’t help feeling that the big city isn’t for her, and once again she is striving, only this time it’s for the right words, the right clothes, the right foods. No matter what she tries she’s not right. Until she is. In that last year of her degree the city opens up to her, she is saying the right things, doing the right things. Until her parents visit for her graduation and events show her that her life has always been about pretending and now she’s lost all sense of who she is and what she’s supposed to be doing.

‘Books offered me a gauzy version of reality and I stepped hungrily into it’

REVIEW: I really, really enjoyed the reading experience I had with this book. The chapters are so short and are like little titbits of information of a disjointed narrative but it works so well. The short chapters are not only perfect for someone who gets a spare five minutes here and there to read, but they also make the book feel very much like a diary which I tend to enjoy. This sort of narrative form really makes you feel like you’re looking into someone’s very private life but it also makes the narrator/protagonist quite complicated and unreliable because we are only seeing the story through one pair of eyes.

The story itself really focuses on our main character Lucy growing up. It focuses on her relationship with her self destructive and distant mother, her alcoholic and emotionally abusive father and her deaf brother which are all equally described so delicately, it definitely felt like emotional literary fiction. I felt like through the story, Lucy was taking these individual memories of her relationships with each family member to understand how she feels about those experiences, each written so lyrically and honestly.

Part three, where Lucy is at University, was my favourite part of the story because we finally start to see Lucy’s personality, ambition and talent come through in the experiences/memories we’re given access to. Reading about Lucy trying to navigate around University and the people you meet at University was so relatable to me and there was some absolutely stunning prose in this part (which I’ve included in my review so you can see exactly what I mean) that I felt like I was being seen loud and clear by Andrews.

Don’t let the format and the disjointed nature of this book put you off because believe me when I say that you will want to underline so many quotes in this book because Andrews just perfectly sums up feelings that we might not have processed ourselves yet. A beautiful, lyrical and raw story but one that I thoroughly enjoyed to its core.

READ THIS IF:

🌊 You’re looking for something a bit different

🌊 You’re fresh out of university or in university and struggling with the move to a different place

🌊 You enjoy emotional and disjointed narratives

‘I had a special English teacher who let me believe that my ideas were important. She introduced me to writers who wound their words around my wrists and refused to let me slip through the net’