Review: Baby Teeth

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

Review: BABY TEETH by Zoje Stage

From the first pages I was entrapped in this story. Kind of like being an observer at the commencement of a 50-car pileup--you want to stop it but chaos rules, you need to look away but can't. I knew from Page One disaster is imminent. Talk about "bad seeds." I remember that novel and movie from my childhood. I also remember "Gaslight," with the husband who endeavoured to convince his wife of her increasing insanity. I immediately adopted the term "gaslighting" into my vocabulary, but here it is, finely tuned and intensely psychopathic. {Shudder}

While the story progresses, Mom Suzette (a sufferer of Crohn's Disease) steadily devolves. Always an ungrounded personality (in this, she is much like her mother), Suzette possibly is hurtling toward a psychotic break--or is she?

The child Hanna, unspeaking but not physiologically mute, is an angel (in her dad's eyes), or demonic (in her mother's perception), or the embodiment of a 17th century adolescent French witch (Hanna's own view). But what--or more importantly, WHO--is Hanna really? To what extremes will she (and Suzette) reach? And what will be the cost in tragedies if little Hanna really is a "Bad Seed"?

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