August 6, 2025

Milktooth, by Jamie Burnet

“I think the thing about life might be that it’s just hard, for no divine reason, and it will change you, with no preordained end, and it’s for you to decide whether the hardness hardens you or cracks you open.”

Oh my gosh, this novel is so good, stayed-up-past-my-bedtime good, because I had to see how it ended. (And how it ended! Wow!!). Jaime Burnet’s MILKTOOTH is absolutely spellbinding, and never misses a beat, the story of Sorcha, whose relationship with her girlfriend Chris fast becomes toxic and abusive, repeating patterns from Sorcha’s own childhood within her religious family from whom she’s been estranged since she came out to them. And while Sorcha knows that her relationship with Chris is not altogether healthy, she still wants to be with her, because otherwise what if she ends up alone and misses this one chance to fulfill her dream of having a baby?

But after she and Chris move to an isolated community in Cape Breton, leaving behind the close-knit queer community Sorcha had found for herself in Halifax, things between them only get worse, and when Sorcha finally gets pregnant, she decides there’s no way she can live with Chris anymore, fashioning an escape to the highlands of Scotland where she connects with her aunt, a midwife, who’s as estranged from the family as she is, and together they—along with Sorcha’s friends back home—begin to plot out a future for Sorcha and her baby.

With beautiful prose and gorgeously-rendered human characters (which is to say REAL), Burnet has created a story that swept me along, mesmerized. The dynamics of Sorcha and Chris’s relationship and of Chris’s emotional abuse are pitch-perfect and also hard to read in just how believable they are (how she wears Sorcha down; the gaslighting) and then just when it might be too much, Sorcha takes flight, and the triumph of her exit and everything that happens after that and also the solace and love of her friends—who are so steadfast, forgiving, and true—makes for the most moving, rich and also hilarious read. I loved it.