Growing Up in the Margins Without Being Marginalized: Jessica Andrews’ Saltwater is reviewed in the New York Times Book Review

We first meet Lucy Bailey in a rough stone cottage on the northwest coast of Ireland, although we don’t learn her last name until the final pages of this often gorgeous first novel by Jessica Andrews. Lucy’s grandfather has died and left his house to Lucy and her mother, Susie, with whom she is newly estranged. Lucy is also newly graduated from a British university, too soon in her estimation. Her years in London have renovated her northern English vowels, taught her to push the ‘‘‘ewk’ out of ‘bewk,’” but they’ve left her wobbly, untethered from her working-class beginnings. She feels shut out by the city’s predacious, moneyed tribes, battered by its “impenetrable shapes” and “fierce elbows.”

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