Teeth The Untold Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America

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I love great writing and I love when a book surprises me. Teeth did both of these things. Let me put it this way. I kept highlighting passages that stunned me with how emotional and gorgeous they were and at the end, I'd highlighted about 50 different passages. That's just a bit crazy. I can honestly say this was one of the best written books I've read in a while.

Three main characters are Rudy, Diana and Teeth. Rudy and Diana are human, but Teeth, aka, the fishboy - is a merman and he "isn't supposed to exist" - because mermaids are mythological creatures. Or, if the characters were anything but stereotypical one dimensional shadow puppets with two modes: Shouty and Really Shouty. This book tells the story of a woman's journey as a mother and partner in central Florida. Neither her son nor her marriage have turned out how she expected them. The first person narrative has a strong voice and is punctuated by occasional glimpses into the perspectives of strangers which, without fail, completely diverge from the narrator's assumptions of how others see her or the situations.The Ironist defines herself through the process of over-defining others. Every character in this novel is over-defined, over-drawn. While this provides us with a great, at times excruciating level of detail, it also paints each of them into a kind of cage wherein all of their actions are predictable. Each of them has a sort of "final vocabulary" (cf. Rorty) that defines the limits of what they might do or say--the doctrines of Islam and the Watchtower Society, of PETA or clinical science. In the worst cases, their adherence to these vocabularies allows Smith to slip them into easy "types" (see: Mr. Topps, Crispin, Joshua, Marcus, the various members of FATE). Smith creates her authorial/narrative identity--what's called a metastable personality--by passively proving that she is not limited by such a final vocabulary, and that in escaping their confines she has a broader, more comprehensive view of the social workings of the world. This is, generally speaking, the goal of any omniscient narrator, but the way that Smith goes about writing this one in particular imparts a certain sense of smugness (the parenthetical asides to the reader, the knowing winks, the jokes at the expense of easy targets) that isn't always present. Smith does a lot of meandering, but in the end, what do a fundamentalist Muslim, a Jehovah's Witness, and ardent animal rights activists have in common? Sounds like a joke, but as it turns out, quite a lot. Who eats too much sugar, leading to dental trauma? Primarily the poor. Who cannot sleep because of continuing dental pain and no available dental care? Primarily the poor. Even with Medicare and Medicaid, dental care has remained a stepchild—and these programs are in jeopardy now. ‘The teeth are no match for . . . a life of poverty,’ Otto says. More teeth failure and its consequences are on their way.” —Peter Edelman I will admit, I'm not exactly the biggest fan of books with paranormal/fantasy elements. I don't think I hate the genre at all. It's just there are so many bad books in the genre and I'd rather read a bad contemporary than a bad paranormal.

jessica andrews' remarkable debut saltwater, is a book that changed my life. i will forever be grateful to her divine prose and her incredible ability to capture parts of my life, childhood and adulthood that were so familiar it were as if they came from my own mind. when i heard her next book, milk teeth, was due out this year i honestly cried. there has never been an author so transformative whose work seems to encompass exactly where i am in my life and exactly what i need at the time. i am beyond grateful to sceptre for sending me an advance copy of her equally as gorgeous, brutally honest and emotional follow-up. Milk Teeth is absolutely gorgeous, perfectly written, emotional, poetic, sexy, heavy, draining, filling, so so so satisfying. So human, so real! Ms Andrews, are you in love with Barcelona? I think you are because you captured its SMELL, which is something that very few authors capture about cities. Yes, Barcelona has a very specific smell. Fruit, heat, sweat, piss, sea, wind, sugar, sewer, empanadas, beer, bread, chocolate. I smell this every day and I love it, I allow it to fill my body and omg, did I enjoy the descriptions of my beloved city in this book. I feel privileged. From the author of the New York Times-bestselling sensation Mostly Dead Things a surprising and moving story of two mothers, one difficult son, and the limitations of marriage, parenthood, and love I admit to being frustrated with this book sometimes because I just wanted Sammie to get herself together. But once you have that full picture, especially with its little gutpunch of an ending, you see that Arnett has been doing more than you realized all along. The longer I sit with it, the more I like it. Though it's so stressful to read that it's a lot easier to enjoy it when it's no longer stressing you out.What don't I love about this book? I can't really name anything. I guess the worst thing is that it made me think about ALL THE THINGS. Which isn't a bad thing at all, is it? But the themes in Teeth are significantly darker than they were in Gone, Gone, Gone, making me hesitant to recommend it to those unable to cope with issues of serious and repetitive sexual abuse. Teeth is dark. Teeth is very, very gothic and depressing and sad. Sometimes I wondered if it was too sad, too dark, too emotive. There’s very little cheer and fun to be had in it. But it turns out it’s just the right amount of dark, sad and emotive for me because I still loved it.

Zadie Smith's prose style here is notably different from her later books. It's like she read all Martin Amis' early novels and to a large extent replicated his distinctive rhythms into her prose. So too is the emphasis on comedy much heavier here than in later books. She's making more effort to charm - which, I suppose, is only natural for a young unpublished author. Un critico inglese che ho cominciato ad apprezzare e seguire quando è stato ‘adottato’ in USA, cioè quando s’è trasferito a vivere e lavorare oltre oceano passando dal Guardian e dal New Republic al New Yorker, James Wood, definisce la letteratura di Zadie Smith e di alcuni suoi colleghi (Rushdie, DeLillo, Pynchon, Foster Wallace) ‘realismo isterico’. Zadie Smith se apropia de sus vidas y las de sus familias para construir un microcosmos donde ejemplificar los múltiples obstáculos a los que los inmigrantes se enfrentan para conseguir su lugar en el mundo. Obstáculos motivados por prejuicios religiosos, culturales, sociales, económicos, raciales, generacionales, de género, de identidad… de los demás, pero también de ellos mismos y que los lleva a buscar diversas formas, muchas veces radicales, de ser aceptados por un país, una religión, una familia, unos amigos... Porque la sensación que se observa con más intensidad en Dientes blancos es la de vacío, un vacío que hay que llenar cueste lo que cueste, aunque eso signifique equivocarse muchas veces y sufrir sin remedio.

Not only does Andrews describe the world she's created in garish (read "vivid and lyrical"?) unnatural gradients and hues, but the characters of this world speak this way too. The love interest writes her a message at one point: I make no secret of the fact that I love Moskowitz’s work with the power of a thousand Beiber fans except I don’t need to suspend my disbelief in Moskowitz’s ability. In this brilliant debut book, hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “a call for sweeping, radical change,” veteran health journalist Mary Otto looks inside America’s mouth, revealing unsettling truths about our unequal society.