I just couldn't get into "Saltwater". I didn't find it very interesting and found myself having a difficult time actually wanting to read this.

I hate to give a book a low rating but this one is to me just awful. It seems to be jumping all over the place. I am not able to even finish it. I tried hard. It’s to descriptive. To much to hold my interest at all. I had high hope for this book but am so let down.
I know others seem to like/love this book but to me it’s like a bunch of short chapters that do not even end before something out of left field is written next. Very short chapters that tend to not go together. It’s actually one that bored me to tears.

I’m very sorry but only one star and I do not recommend this one at all.

Thank you to #NetGalley, #Jessica Andrews

A relatively standard coming-of-age novel, but with absolutely gorgeous prose. You'll get lost in this book.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from Jessica Andrews’s Saltwater. The chapters are short, told in snippets. The pace was steady, and the writing style was great, but I didn’t love nor hate it. It’s hard to explain but I thought the story was meh.


Thank you, FSG Press for gifting me this DARC via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review. Over all this was a 3/5 star read.

This is Lucy's coming of age story. It's told in her voice and in snippets. The prose can be described as either poetic or over the top purple (it's both). The themes will be familiar to those who read the genre but it's distinguished by location- both in England and Donegal, Ireland. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. It's a quick read that will appeal to fans of literary fiction.

“It begins with our bodies. Skin on skin. My body burst from yours. Safe together in the violet dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us. I am wet and glistening like a beetroot pulsing in soil. Fasting and gulping. There are wounds in your belly and welts around your nipples, puffy and purpling.”

So begins Saltwater, a generic coming-of-age tale that flits around between the key events in the protagonist Lucy’s life, growing up in Sunderland and Donegal before moving to London for university. With a focus on Lucy’s relationship with her mother, there are chapters interspersed throughout the narrative where Lucy narrates directly to her mother from various stages in her life, beginning with this… colorful passage describing her own birth. (Why do authors do this.)

So quite literally from page one I wasn’t getting on with this book. I don’t necessarily believe there’s such a thing as ‘good writing’ or ‘bad writing’ – taste is subjective. You may read these passages and be drawn to them and that is perfectly all right, but from my perspective, Andrews’ prose was labored and contrived and overwrought and I hated every minute of it. Here are just a few passages I highlighted that had me rolling my eyes:

“Redness cracking. Fissures forming. You are falling towards us, rich and syrup-soft. Flesh roiling. Bones shifting. Tongues over bellies and fingers in wet places.”

“My father is passed out in a chair and I am dozing on his lap in a mushroom of white lace.”

“The sunsets are crisp and smell of cardigans.”

“He smelled of leather, superglue and love.”

“Sludge horrible delicious between my toes.”

(I sent a couple of these select quotes to a friend who asked if the book was written by a random word generator. I thought that was so spot-on I told him I was going to steal that line for my review.)

But it wasn’t just Andrews’… questionable word choices that bothered me; it was how she felt the need to bash the reader over the head with what she considered to be the book’s salient themes:

“Bridges are in-between spaces and I was in between, too.”

[regarding how Lucy would use the Shard as a landmark to orient herself in the city] “I feel an affinity with the Shard, even though it is a symbol of the wealth and status I am so far removed from.”

Everything was just so painfully on the nose. There already isn’t a whole lot of thematic variance amongst this sort of bildungsroman, so the need to shove these incredibly basic concepts down the reader’s throat struck me as beyond unnecessary.

Anyway, moving past the atrocious writing, another thing that grated is the cruelly stereotypical portrayal of the Irish – regarding the narrator’s grandfather’s childhood in Ireland, after establishing that he slept in his aunt’s barn, this paragraph is, quite literally, the only information we receive about that period in his life:

“Auntie Kitty rationed the hot water and made anyone who entered the house throw holy sand over their left shoulder, To Keep Away The Devil. Her husband was in the IRA and they housed radical members of Sinn Féin in their attic.”

Poverty, religious fanaticism, and the IRA – there’s only one stereotype missing here; oh, wait:

“I have noticed that many of the young men in Donegal have shaking hands. […] I ask my mother what it is that makes them shake. ‘It’ll be the drink,’ she says, sagely.”

This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t the extent of Andrews’ portrayal of Ireland, but there truly is nothing else there, despite Lucy spending long periods of her life in Donegal.

And therein lies the main problem: this is a book about carving out your identity in relation to the places you live, but the book itself has no sense of place. It jumped around a lot in chronology, which in and of itself wasn’t a problem, but I would quickly lose track of whether Lucy was in Donegal or London or Sunderland, because the depictions of each felt the exact same. I’ve never read another book about place that’s so devoid of atmosphere.

Finally (sorry, I bet you thought I was done) – Lucy’s younger brother is deaf as a child, and then has a cochlear implant to restore his hearing. I already found this to be a bit of an odd narrative choice given the dearth of deafness representation in literature; I was hoping there would later be a bit of nuance to explain this decision by the author, but instead this subplot is pretty much dropped, barring an incredibly sloppy few pages in which she describes his transition from sign language to verbal speech:

“He wanted to dance to music and to enjoy the delicate nuance of spoken language. He learned the way that putting feelings into words and out into the world could ease the pressure inside, like letting air out of a balloon.”

So… sign language isn’t ‘putting feelings into words and out into the world’? Ok then.

I started and finished this on January 1 and I’m predicting it’s going to be my least favorite book of the year. Watch this space in 12 months.

Thank you to Netgalley and FSG for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review. All quotes are taken from the ARC, not a finished copy, and are subject to change.

This novel is the story of Lucy from Sunderland, England told in short fragments instead of chapters, moving from past to present.. I enjoyed this style of writing.
Lucy has just graduated from college and has moved to her late grandfathers cottage in Ireland and trying to figure out her place in the world.
Lucy is the narrator throughout, tells the story of growing up with a close relationship to her mom, having a brother born deaf, an alcoholic father and descriptions of her neighborhood. Goes on to describe her college years in London.
The writing was very moving in regards to her feelings for her mother, and just really good writing throughout.

Thanks to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for the ARC

This was a struggle. The narration is choppy, shifting between generations, sometimes confusingly so. The welter of detail can be fabulous or overwhelming, like a parade of nostalgia. The work seems both modish, at a time when young Irish women writers are delivering this kind of introverted, oblique stuff, and cliched - the drinking, the poverty, the intensity, the romance. Not my cup of tea,

I disliked the choppy, back and forth style of writing. The descriptions were good, but this did not appeal to me as a reader.

Thank you Netgalley.

”It begins with our bodies. Skin on skin. My body burst from yours. Safe together in the violet dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us.” <.b>

”For now our secrets are only ours. You press me to your chest and I am you and I am not you and we will not always belong to each other but for now it is us and here it is quiet. I rise and fall with your breath in this bed. We are safe in the pink together.”

This is a promising coming-of-age debut novel set partially in England, and partially in Donegal, Ireland. This is an author I know I will read again for her ability to pull me into her world, her story unflinchingly real, occasionally dark, heartrending, raw and honest, but oh-so lovely overall. Shared in what feels like a memoir-ish style, we follow her as she shares her memory of people and events that have shaped her life, the focus at the heart of this is on the bond between mothers and daughters. Friends, neighbors and family. Her mother, a mostly absent father, and a younger brother who was born profoundly deaf, which led to some life-changing moments for them all. A grandfather’s death that leaves her with a haunting memory. A grandmother that brings light and love to her life, she reminisces in her writing that ”Everything about her was silver; her voice as she sang along to the radio in the morning, the shiny fish scales caught on her tabard at the end of the day and the hole that she left in our lives when she died, edged like a fifty-pence piece.”

There are no long chapters in this book, rather this is told in brief snippets, fragments of thoughts at times, other times longer thoughts, as these are years of change for her, of her determining which path she wants to follow. It wanders back and forth through time, from childhood on, the memories of a childhood in one place haunting her, and those memories against the life she has built in this new home. Her heart eternally divided between these two places.

There are elements of this that reminded me of the writing of Sara Baume, an Irish author that I love. The introspective nature of this, the more often than not internal dialogue that presents an almost enveloping feeling of solitude, and the simple, gorgeous prose made for a very moving, beautifully shared story about the complex nature of mothers and daughters, gathering the internal strength through our memories, allowing others to see us, as well.



Pub Date: 14 Jan 2020


Many thanks for the ARC provided by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I liked that this novel takes the traditional coming-of-age story and adds a female, working class protagonist. There are some lovely scenes setting up her family members which are great writing. But, overall, the disjointed storytelling style didn’t really work for me.