Saltwater

October 7, 2019
Twenty-five-year-old Lucy Bailey reflects on her life after having moved from London to a quiet family home on the west coast of Ireland in this solid nonlinear debut from Andrews. Lucy quits her bartending job and relocates to the house her recently deceased grandfather bequeathed to her in the tiny fishing town of Burtonport. Though she once intended to make her life in bustling London, Lucy finds that the unhurried pace of the port appeals to her. Short vignettes chronicle a childhood with her devoted mother, Susie, who raised Lucy and her deaf younger brother, Josh, in a working-class town without much help from their alcoholic father. As Lucy grows up, she becomes a big reader, takes a shine to the Beat writers, and is encouraged by a high school teacher. Much of Andrews’s novel concerns Lucy finding herself as a teenager and college student, but this part of the story isn’t as engrossing as Lucy contemplating her family ties, the highlight of the book: “I think about all of the times my grandfather stumbled drunk up this road and now here I am, doing the same.” Her passages about dating and trying to fit in pale in comparison. Still, this coming-of-age story will appeal to readers who appreciate strong mother-daughter relationships.

October 15, 2019
A young woman lays bare her memories in a fragmented debut. "It begins with our bodies. Skin on Skin. My body burst from yours. Safe together in the violent dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us," begins Andrews' debut novel: a meditation on mother-daughter relationships and finding a place to call home. The coming-of-age story is told from the perspective of Lucy, a millennial trying to navigate her present while examining her past. Present-day Lucy lives in her late grandfather's cottage in Ireland, where she recounts her memories of childhood in northern England. In short vignettes, she remembers the absence of her alcoholic father, the experience of learning to communicate with her deaf brother, and the way her beautiful mother struggled to keep everyone (including herself) together. She also recounts her wild youth, her university experience in London, and the litany of unnamed men who circle her. Lucy's thoughts constantly return to her mother--the first and great love of her life--and their relationship, which has become strained over the years. As a child, she thought: "I would forever be in her orbit, moving towards her and pulling away while she quietly controlled the tides, anchoring me to something." The natural untethering that happens between mothers and daughters is remarkably rendered--the heartsickness given gravitas equal to romantic relationships. Andrews is undoubtedly a talented writer, but this book seems more concerned with sentence-level beauty than narrative. The lovely minutiae of the vignettes sometimes overshadow or crowd out the book's larger themes. Despite this, Andrews' writing explores themes like memory, home, womanhood, and mother-daughter relationships with shattering clarity: "Girls with orange cheeks in push-up bras brushed past us, smelling of the future" and "that safe, yellow space of bedtimes and steamy kitchens." A beautifully written experimental novel that lacks narrative momentum.

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November 1, 2019
Poet Andrews' debut novel, about a young, working-class woman coming-of-age in northern England and Ireland, reads almost like a memoir. Lucy and her mother are devoted to one another, even as Lucy's mom struggles to keep the family afloat while her dad goes on alcohol binges disappearing for days at a time. Her mother uproots Lucy and her brother to Ireland to live with their grandparents, and finds happiness with new friends and lovers. Later, Lucy will also escape to Ireland looking for a piece of her and her mother's past. Their stories intermingle through the novel's first half, while the second half focuses on Lucy attending university in London, where she's intent on remaking herself even as her upbringing sets her apart. Andrews writes beautiful, unusual descriptions, and short chapters give the story a poetic sensibility. Her intertwining of time periods and mother-daughter relationships through generations is so well done that it is a real loss when she abandons it for a more straightforward telling. Andrews' debut declares her one to watch.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)