By Megan Thomas
I flew through Hot Milk on a beach holiday in Italy a little while back, which seems fitting for a story told in a way that I can only describe as a strange dream on a hot summer night. You wake, tangled in your sticky sheets, unsure whether you’re still asleep and captivated by the ambiguity of what you’ve just experienced.
Let me not be so metaphorical or mysterious in my description of the book that you get to the end of this post and remain unsure of what Hot Milk is about… Sofia and her mother, Rose, have rented a beach house in Spain so that Rose can be treated at a clinic by an enigmatic doctor named Gómez, who may or may not be a quack. Regardless, Rose has remortgaged her flat to afford his fees. Not to mention, we are never quite sure what is wrong with Rose – nor is Sofia, who worries that the unexplainable paralysis that comes and goes is less a physical ailment and more a means of keeping Sofia nearby.
This story, as outlined above, may seem simple and I think in many ways it is, even when you consider Sofia’s sexual rediscovery and the Greek ex-husband that abandoned both mother and daughter in England many years before. But what is most noteworthy is the style. From the fierce, repeated jelly fish stings to the blistering heat, this novel is eerie, sensual, confronting and detached all at once, mirroring the protagonist’s internal existence.
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