Yes. All of your primary teeth are temporary. You have 20 primary teeth before the development of 32 permanent teeth. Your wisdom teeth will join your permanent teeth at around 17 to 25 years old, but there is no milk tooth for them to replace – they will erupt independently. Signed copies of Milk Teeth will be available, on the night, and we will also have (free) exclusive merch available for every attendee!

So far so good, and I mean really good. Amrita Mahale’s writing shines. She builds the structure meticulously, and her grasp on characters, whether Mumbai’s, that of her protagonists, or of minor players, is so sure-footed, nuanced and complex that you are quite simply blown away. The language is poised and effective; even the mundane acquires a polish. I think about all the years I have struggled to articulate myself in my own language, pushing my words into my body instead." A girl grows up in the north-east of England amid scarcity, precarity and a toxic culture of bodily shame,certain that she must make herself ever smaller to be loved.A well-thought story covering so much more than the familial relationship, the various issues faced by the residents of the city or even the exploration of one’s sexuality. It was remarkable how a single plot contained so many significant subjects. The characters come alive fantastically. Their course of relationship reminding you of your own past relationships, the situations in the story giving you more clarity on your own situations, even the sadness multiplied. JA: I can only speak from my own experience, but there are two edges to it. If you do feel like an outsider in certain spaces, because of systemic problems, if you don’t have the language to understand or articulate those systemic problems, you internalise it, right? It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m wrong, I’m weird, I don’t fit in.’ All of that gets turned in on you, to make you feel like you’re not really deserving of things. But then on the other side, I was thinking a lot about the messaging around my own teenage years. I was a teenager in the early 2000s, and it was the whole size zero, Kate Moss, heroin chic sort of vibe. I think the language and the rhetoric around that time was always about diminishing yourself and making yourself smaller. And there was a very self-destructive ethos around that time. Pop culture was Skins or The Libertines, and it was all about taking loads of drugs and doing wild things all the time.

The heat of Barcelona and the warmth of the romance and emotions between our two main characters juxtapose so well with the coldness of London and the fear and loneliness felt as well as the sadness, anxiety and negative but entirely overpowering view and perception of food, body image, and eating. Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews was my most anticipated read of 2022, the moment I heard Andrews had written/was working on a new novel I practically squealed with excitement. When a copy of Milk Teeth was in my postbox on Friday morning I honestly felt like I’d won the lottery and had to explain to my parents who were looking at me with rather great levels of concern what this book was and why I was so worked up over it. So I’m extremely grateful to the publishers for sending this copy my way.Please join us for MTO Press’s launch of Jen Calleja’s translation of the debut novel from Helene Bukowski, originally written in German, Milk Teeth! Recent Examples on the Web As Ana Cristina Herreros explains, long ago in Spain children flung their milk teeth up onto the roofs of their houses so that a Tooth Mouse might collect them. — Meghan Cox Gurdon, wsj.com, 7 Apr. 2023 Your kid’s milk teeth: the cost of playing the tooth fairy (ten dollars for the first tooth, five dollars for teeth two to four and molars, two dollars for the rest). — Francesca Carington, The New Yorker, 20 Feb. 2023 Finlayson said the team had also found the milk tooth of a Neanderthal around 4 years old, and hypothesized that they could have been dragged into the cave by a hyaena. — Jeevan Ravindran, CNN, 30 Sep. 2021 Relatives came in and out, helping with the children and watching as Youssef grew milk teeth and Samer went to school and adjusted to life in a strange country. — Greg Betza, Washington Post, 1 May 2018 A middle-class Konkani speaker, Ira lives in a residential building, Asha Nivas, in the fast-growing neighbourhood of Matunga. The story begins with the residents of Asha Nivas, including the families of Ira Kamat and Kartik Kini, her next-door neighbour and fellow Konkani speaker, coming together to agonise over their landlord’s plan to redevelop the building. If that was not enough, the way Kartik chooses to end his engagement is even more farcical, if not criminal. He plans to eject himself from the trap of their impending marriage by ‘exposing’ Ira’s previous relationship with a Muslim. Ira’s past becomes an instrument for his freedom, notwithstanding the moral confusion of a city reeling from recent communal fractures.

I'm reminded of the ways in which I first began my love for reading. The craft of sentences. How one word sits to the next. How unexpected lyricism erupts in the middle of a voice, in a swift flaunt. Don't let children run around with a toothbrush in their mouth, as they may have an accident and hurt themselves. This city was our common ground, I want to tell Kaiz. Not simply its soil, nor its salt or tides, not lines on any map, nor buildings and streets. Something else entirely. An image, a dream, an idea that beguiled both of us: a magical place with chaos in its code, where our stories collided briefly." From the age of 3, children should be offered fluoride varnish application at least twice a year. Younger children may also be offered this treatment if your dentist thinks they need it.Milk Teeth is a story of loneliness, belonging, identity, and overall love - and how we’re deserving of it. The story concerns Skalde and Edith, her mother, who live as part of a community that has separated itself from the rest of the world and is currently trying to survive what can only be described as a climate apocalypse. Skalde has only ever known life with her mother: she rarely crosses the boundaries of their plot to visit neighbours and she certainly never leaves their zone. She passes the days reading, writing and trying to live under her reclusive rules, until, one day, a girl named Meisis arrives and, against Edith's wishes, Skalde decides to take her in. Meisis's arrival, to a place that has rejected both the outside and the outsider, proves to be too much for the community to handle.

I wanted the reader to feel like they’re very much within the protagonist’s body, to understand how it feels when she is denying herself things, or when her life was hard, but also to feel all the sensory experiences of her coming into her body. As the protagonist is falling for the world, I wanted the reader to sort of fall with her. Falling into the love story, and falling into the humidity. I guess it’s a kind of letting go. Andrews deftly covers the toxic diet and body culture of the early 2000s with our young protagonist, who, for most of her life, has been subjected to this culture from magazines, television shows, friends and family in her life etc. And having said all of that, I’d like to thank Amrita for being a role model like no other. For continuing to be a role model like no other. For her blog. For her TED Talk. For her book. For all of her future books. For telling 18-year-old me that it is okay to feel like a misfit if it compels you to express yourself for who you really are. For going against the grain. For pursuing her dream. For showing me that you can write a novel if you pour your heart and head into it. Thank you.Milk Teeth is an intensely personal novel. The telling of a lived history through the lens of love. Those of us who grew up in the India of the 90s will recognise our parents, friends and the pace and rhythm of life the book so wonderfully describes. For me personally, it is amongst the best articulations of how it felt to grow up middle class in an emerging India. For Ira and Kartik, though, the old values their parents cling to are burdensome. Karthik is often livid at his parent’s choices. He dreams of being wealthy.