Book Review: “Baby Teeth” by Zoje Stage
“It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn’t love you back. No one could do it forever.”
Spooky kids in horror are one of my favorite tropes. I love how sinister it can seem for a small, innocent child to have devilish intentions, and how creepy in particular little girls are in the world of horror. From The Ring, scary movies have proven to me that tiny girls can provide BIG scares in little packages.
Even separate from the more supernatural part of the genre is THE GOOD SON-esque argument that sometimes, kids are just born bad. They’re evil from the start, and they go on to do evil things. This is more widely recognized now as being largely due to some sort of personality or empathy disorder, but the facts of the matter remain: these kids are scary.
In BABY TEETH, we’re introduced to Hanna and her parents. Hanna loves her father, and is on her best behavior whenever he’s around. With her mother, however, she’s another little girl entirely. I didn’t know if this one would be spooky, and it did turn out to be more of a thriller than what I’d lump in as “horror”, but it kept me on my toes.
Hanna’s mother Suzette is at her wits end, struggling with a chronic illness as well as a dangerously malevolent daughter. The chapters spent with Suzette allow a look into the overwhelmed mind of a mother at war with her body, her health, and her daughter. She’s unsure of how to fix things, but keeps trying because it’s what she feels she should do. This sort of dedication as a mother to a child that very clearly wants nothing to do with her would probably be pretty relatable to the parents of teens – but little Hanna is only seven, and her disdain of her mother seems a lot more malicious.
This was a pretty quick read, although I found a bit of the middle to be repetitive. I felt for Suzette and her difficult circumstances, but she seemed to cross over a line from being a protagonist I could relate to and empathize with, and one that felt weak and a little difficult to believe. As many other reviewers have mentioned, why doesn’t she utilize the wonderful world of modern technology to help document the wacky stuff Hanna does? This was a gaping plot hole that I kept coming back to, and one that could have easily changed the entire book.
That said, I did enjoy my time spent with the world built by Stage, and her writing was easy to get sucked into and swept away by. She has another book recently published this year called WONDERLAND, and I am so excited to pick it up!
