from Vagrant Press

Say what you will about a big, explosive storyline—bright flashing lights, loud sounds, breakneck speeds—there is something so specifically affecting about a book that keeps its devastation quiet.

Nova Scotia novelist Jaime Burnet’s second work, milktooth, is full of tiny moments. The line between prose and poetry is blurred here, with the wistfulness of a life being lived through a haze. That haze that is occasionally punctuated with descriptions of visceral physicality that pierce through: a jar of cherries in thick glowing syrup, a litre of whole milk drank in one long gulp, the moon as a scythe. The agony of waiting for a piece of mail that will almost certainly wound you but may also free you—at least from the bondage of the waiting.

A milk tooth—the physical item of the book’s title—is a temporary tooth of a young mammal. Your baby tooth. The one that’s meant to fall out and be replaced by something permanent. Sorcha, our narrator through milktooth, is waiting for her permanent life to begin. We find her in what could be an idyllic situation. Living in a small town in Cape Breton, in a charming old house with lots of potential, with her very handsome girlfriend Chris. Chris has all the 90s heartthrob charm she could have wished for and is willing to help Sorcha fulfill the dream of her life: having a baby.

But the narrative oscillates between dream and nightmare as Chris swings from big romantic gestures to being maybe the meanest lesbian ever committed to print. In the description of Sorcha’s increasing isolation away from her friends and her life outside of Chris, the quietness of the language again cuts deep. Its subtlety ties to the subtlety of the abuse. For the first hundred pages or so, the reader inches along with Sorcha as she quietly rationalizes the behaviour she’s experiencing. Her girlfriend may not be an abuser. She may be a wounded soul doing her best. We as the reader are removed enough from the situation to see that the reality is the former, rather than the latter, but there is no moving our narrator forwards before she’s ready to see that distinction for herself.

There is a gentle suffocation in this first part of the book as Sorcha is increasingly trapped, with tantalizing and heartbreaking flashbacks to the times along the way when she could have made another choice—could have chosen her friends and her freedom. Interspersed flashbacks to her also-stifling early family life go a long way to explaining why betting on herself would be so particularly hard to do.

So, the moment when—finally pregnant and experiencing ever-worsening abuse—Sorcha decides she has to make an escape feels like a blast of fresh air. When her estranged aunt, a retired midwife, sends an unexpected message looking to connect, the hope of something better starts to feel like it might have real legs. And when that connection turns into a spur-of-the-moment flight to her aunt’s home in the Scottish Highlands, it’s absolute fireworks—until we slowly return to the dread of the question: what happens if Chris finds her?

With milktooth, Burnet achieves a beautiful balance of pathos, humour and heart-wrenching storytelling, as we witness Sorcha wrenching her way towards—we hope—a permanently better life. ■

KATE SPENCER(she/her) is a writer, arts administrator and choral singer living in K’jipuktuk/Halifax.