Review: Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage

Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was provided an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.  A huge thank you to St. Martin's Press for sending me an advanced copy.  this releases July 17th. 

This book was a trip. I loved that it was set in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. It was kind of cool to read a book set in places I actually knew. When the author referenced a street or a neighborhood, I knew exactly where the characters were. When I was a teenager, I used to babysit not far from where the Jensen’s lived in the book.

This book is quite the thriller. You aren’t ever quite sure what is going on with the family, and the ending left me scratching my head. Not a bad thing though. I wasn’t quite sure who the true villain was when I closed the book.

The story follows Hannah a seven year old terror who wants nothing but her mother to go away permanently. She loves her father, mainly because he dotes on her and doesn’t see any of the nasty things she does. Mommy on the other hand never quite measures up to Hannah’s standards, and is always hogging Daddy’s attention. Hannah doesn’t speak, she can make noises, and she is very intelligent. He lack of speech is alarming to her parents, but they have had her checked out and there doesn’t appear to be anything medically preventing her speech so they are trying different things to unlock her voice. Hannah isn’t having any of it though. Little do they know the devious things going on in her head, she wants to say plenty but the words just won’t come out. She is constantly plotting and scheming ways to get Mommy out of the picture so she can have Daddy all to herself. She has plenty of inner dialogue, and it’s pretty disturbing given her age. The things she thinks and does are pretty alarming for a child of her age.

Suzette is Hannah’s mother. She does her best to keep up appearances. She wants to appear to be beautiful so her husband wants her, she wants to appear to be the perfect wife and mother so people don’t judge her, and she wants everything to be clean and tidy. She also has Chrohn’s disease which comes up a lot in the novel, and is a major cause of emotional and physical distress in her life. While Suzette is forcing everything to be perfect, everything is falling down around her. Suzette did not have the model mother growing up, so she fears that she is failing at motherhood at every turn. Hannah doesn’t exactly make it easy on her. She manipulates people and situations to get what she wants, and because Suzette is with her most of the time she is the target of most of Hannah’s outbursts. Alex, Suzette’s husband, lives in blissful ignorance of his daughter’s strange behaviors. His life is perfect; pretty wife and a beautiful daughter who just needs the right challenges because she is too smart for regular education. His daughter never does the horrid things Suzette claims she does, he just can’t believe that of his angel. This causes a rift between them and Suzette to become even more emotionally exhausted from dealing with Hannah all day and keeping up the pretense of perfection.

I found many aspects of this book to be unrealistic as opposed to physiologically thrilling. Some of the stuff Hannah does to Suzette is pretty serious, and they just put her to bed and never call the police or put her in the hospital for psychiatric treatment. I mean it know its fiction, but she does some scary stuff and they don’t do anything about it. The characters just don’t have any common sense, and they make dumb decisions. The things Hannah does in the book aren’t thrilling, they are dark and have shock value. There are some aspects and twists that caught me off guard for sure, but those were too sparse to make this entirely a physiological thriller in my opinion. I wanted more of those moments than the outlandish, shocking ones. I liked the book, it very much reminded me of the movie The Good Son. Overall, there were some flaws with the book but I found myself wanting to know what happened and not wanting to put the book down.


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