Review: Baby Teeth

Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Hanna is seven years old and has yet to speak. She does manage to communicate, though, through malice toward her mother, Suzette. How can Suzette deal with her daughter's psychopathic tendencies when no one believes her?

I got this from Netgalley and the promise of a creepy homicidal kid lured me in. I was a little disappointed.

Like I said in the teaser, Hanna is seven years old, mute, and wishes violence death upon her mother. Suzette is a stay at home mom with Crohn's Disease. Hanna definitely wants mommy out of the way so she can have daddy all to herself. It sounds interesting but I was ultimately bored by most of it.

Alex, the dad, is unbelievably oblivious and I thought Suzette was kind of a doormat. How much shit does one person have to eat before they finally do something? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Hanna was interesting but everything she was planning was told from her point of view before it happened so there were very few surprises. I think it would have worked a lot better if we'd never got a glimpse inside Hanna's head.

It was engaging enough to finish and Zoje Stage's writing was good in a technical sense. The book made me feel very uneasy at times but that was its biggest accomplishment. I didn't find it suspenseful and by the end I was hoping Hanna would somehow kill both of her parents. Two out of five stars.

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