Baby Teeth

Product Information

This dark, terrifying novel unfolds as a battle of wits between a struggling mother and her psychotic young daughter and its genius is that the reader’s allegiance isn’t allowed to linger too long on either side. It makes us feel better to say we 'can’t look away,' but really it’s that we don’t want to look away.

During my first pregnancy, when I found out I was having a boy, I took a piece of paper and started free-associating around the phrase “my son,” which felt so strange in my mouth.Christine Penmark learns, to her horror, that she’s the only surviving descendant of a notorious female serial killer. There was a documentary about a 6 year old girl who was a psychopath and they did an interview with her and i thought this can’t be right, she sounds really clever, and says things i don’t think i knew when i was 6.

She had taken a photo of Suzette while she slept that morning, and she glued it into the center of a collage of photos of dead bodies that she had found on the internet and printed. Somewhere in this seven year old, a bitter, murderous forty-year old exists, and throughout each Hannah chapter she builds and capitalizes on her plans, grinding the reader into a repetitive evil that is equal parts disturbing and stolen from every kid-gone-evil story that has proceeded it. Grehan’s verse novel skilfully charts uncertainty, temptation and the course of a strange, desperate love. I did enjoy seeing the story behind a child's eyes, if anything I think that was the best piece of the book. I like the fairy tale aspect of the book and how it can get twisted by Hanna who thinks of herself as the hero and an innocent victim.And as Hanna’s subtle acts of cruelty threaten to tear her and Alex apart, Suzette fears her very life may be in grave danger. If it wasn't for her inconsolable fear of losing so much small intestine that she'd lose the inalienable right to shit on a toilet like a normal person. I will tell you that I have been a psychiatric and mental health nurse for 12 years and this book is closer to fiction that you would like to really believe. Hannah seemed unrealistic to me, and I know she’s supposed to be this super creepy child but her “scariness” was overdone. Maybe if the people in the white coats blew up the pictures they'd see her thoughts, mapped like mountains and railroad tracks, across her ghostly skull.