Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage

😩😩😩😩= 4 frightened faces

WARNING: MEAN, CREEPY CHILD ALERT!!

If you’ve ever seen the 1956 movie, The Bad Seed, the little girl in Baby Teeth is a younger version of that disturbed child, but worse!! Hanna’s behaviour makes it clear that there’s something seriously amiss with her, but her father refuses to acknowledge it since she’s all sunshine and roses when she’s with him. Consequently, her mother’s accusations about their daughter fall on deaf ears. Sweet little Hanna couldn’t possibly be as bad as Suzette asserts. Or could she? Suzette is a nervous wreck, trying to find out what’s wrong with Hanna. Everything she says to her daughter is taken as a personal affront, and Hanna lies in wait for the perfect opportunity to retaliate. She wants her father to herself, but has she gone too far to achieve her goal?

I was scared y’all. While reading Baby Teeth I had mixed emotions. But mostly I was feeling like…

Hanna’s devious, demented mind made me stop and ponder what I’d do if I had a child like her. Sometimes I felt like shouting at Hanna’s mother….RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!

At other times I wondered what Suzette could have done to make her daughter feel the way she did. 🤔

I enjoyed this book. It was well-written and compulsively readable. I felt intrigued, horrified, angry, compassionate and sad while reading it. I did have a couple of issues with the book. For one thing, Hanna’s internal dialog, at times, seemed too mature for a seven-year-old child, even a precocious one. I had to suspend disbelief to believe that she could contemplate and then execute some of the dastardly things she did. Another issue stemmed from the author’s occasional use of vulgar language which was entirely unnecessary. I’d be reading along happily and then BAM!, I would get hit with a vulgar word or statement and I thought, “what just happened here?!” 😡 Omitting those parts would not have changed the highly satisfying quality of the book.

Overall, Baby Teeth was a very good thriller that kept me in suspense, frightened me and left me with a contented smile on my face at the end.

Many thanks to St. Martin’s Press for an ARC of Baby Teeth. All opinions about the book are honest and entirely my own.

Have a great day everyone, and thank you so much for visiting.