Anne-Marie Dufossett was a witch...
I recently finished reading Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage. I had really wanted to read this book - the title and cover art of the book are amazing, but unfortunately, they are the high points of the book.
The basic plot is that Suzette is the mother of a seven year old girl named Hanna who never talks. After being tested, a doctor suggests that she physically can talk and that it’s a mental issue. Hanna is a fucking demon child who wants to psychologically and physically torture and kill her mother. Hanna is freakishly smart and engages in all sorts of evil strategies throughout the book to hurt her mother. However, being so smart, she has figured out how to manipulate her father by being sweet as an angel around him, so when Suzette complains to her husband, he never believes her.
Suzette also has Crohn’s disease and a large portion of the book relates to her health. As an example of how disturbed Hanna is, she actually sneaks downstairs one night, empties out her mother’s medication capsules and refills them with flour to try to kill her. The GI aspects of the book are kind of nasty and I didn’t really get what the author’s end game was with it, other than setting up a way for Hanna to hurt her mother.
This book is supposed to be a thriller, and it does have some pretty creepy scenes with Hanna, but, it’s certainly not on the Gone Girl/The Wife Between Us/The Luckiest Girl Alive level.
At the beginning of the book, I did not like Hanna – she was Satan’s spawn and I really wanted Suzette to beat the hell out of her and/or leave her and her husband and have a happy life. Hanna is evil and her dad/Suzette’s husband was oblivious; Suzette is better off without them. I routed for Suzette and felt that that was the victim.
However, by the end of the book, I did not like anyone. Suzette was really just as disturbed as her daughter, and the dad was a moron.
SPOILER ALERT: Ultimately, Suzette and Hanna are so in love with Alex (the husband/dad), that they can’t co-exist. What the actual fuck?! Not only is that just a dumb ending, Alex was such a jackass that Mommy/Daughter Dumb and Dumber would have been better off channeling their crazy energies to get rid of him.
Baby Teeth is the type of book that you get for free from Amazon Prime – those books are never that good, but you didn’t pay for them, so no harm, no foul. Except I paid for this one and I am not happy about it.
To end on a positive, besides the title and the art being awesome, there is one really funny scene. After secretly getting her into a school that she will not want to go to, Suzette asks Hanna if she wants to make a stuffed animal together based on her favorite bedtime story. Hanna’s reaction “is this really Mommy? Mommy with a good idea?” which I found inexplicably really funny. She can’t believe her mother isn’t totally superfluous.
