From an outsiders perspective, the Janson’s seem like the perfect family; a loving couple, Suzette and Alex, and their adorable 7-year-old daughter, Hanna. But this family has a deep, dark, sinister secret. Hanna has been exhibiting signs of sociopathy and finding ways to torture her mother. To her father, on the other hand, she is a perfect angel and has him wrapped around her little figure. The story is told from the alternating perspectives of Suzette and Hanna.

I loved this and devoured it in a day. The story, reminiscent of We Need to Talk About Kevin, was heart wrenching yet wickedly delicious and compulsively readable. I could not get enough and I have high hopes for a sequel. I found the the plot to be refreshing, original and fast moving and the character development outstanding. 5 stars!

Many thanks to Netgalley, St. Martin’s Press and Zoje Stage for my complimentary e-copy ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage is the novel that both of my daughters are banned from reading. Because if they do I may never get any granddaughters from them! Seriously, this may be the creepiest novel of the season and you simply cannot miss it!

Hanna is a sweet but silent seven year old little girl who loves her Daddy so much that Mommy sometimes gets in the way.

Suzette is a devoted, stay at home mother who cannot get her beautiful little girl to speak to her. The doctors all say that there is nothing wrong with Hanna, that there is no medical reason why she does not speak. But Suzette sees something else in her child. Something cruel and manipulative that is beginning to frighten her. No school will take her, so Suzette spends her days home schooling Hanna and sees sides of her child no one else does and no one else will believe.

"...Whap-whap. Hanna slammed her palm on the closed door. Kicked it. Uttered a high-pitched squeal of protest.
'Hanna! Go downstairs! Move on to another question that you can do on your own and I'll be down in a minute!'
She waited, listening, hoping to hear an exasperated humphh of defeat and the retreating sound of small feet. But no. The doorknob jiggled. Tentatively, then more insistently. Hanna kicked the door again.
They didn't spank. And Alex never even yelled. The only profanity he used in front of her was in Swedish. But the kid was pushing it. Suzette unlocked the door and whipped it open.
'For fuck's sake, Hanna. Why don't you ever listen to me?'
The girl stood there, arms loosely at her sides, considering her mother. Then her eyes rolled back until they were solid white. Dead nothingness in the sockets.
'Because I'm not Hanna,' the girl whispered..."

Now Hanna will speak but only to Suzette and when she does, it is in a French accent. To the rest of the world Hanna is still silent and Suzette does not know how to explain to the doctors and the schools and even her her husband Alex that Hanna can talk. The child says that her name is Marie-Anne Dufosset, a witch that was killed 1679, the last witch killed in France.

Alex loves his little girl. He realizes that she has special needs and that she is very bright. He also love his wife Suzette and knows that she also has needs. Suzette suffers from Crohn's disease that was allowed to go untreated for much of her life. Her relationship with her own mother was horrible and Alex wonders if that relationship has somehow affected the way Suzette is with Hanna. He cannot believe the stories that he is told about his own daughter. She is so loving with him. Suzette is starting to sound unhinged and he cannot understand what is happening between the two of them.

"...I swear, Alex...I don't know what happened.' She wrapped a reusable Freez Pak into a dish towel. She tried to hand it to Hanna, but he took it from her and placed it gently on their daughter's swollen arm. He picked her up and carried her upstairs.
'Only leave it on for a few minutes at a time, otherwise it'll get too cold,' she called to him.
He didn't acknowledge her.
'Make sure there's enough fabric against her skin...'
'We've got this.' He disappeared without looking at her. His condemnation reverberated around the room.
She pressed her fingers to her lips and for a moment forgot to breathe.
Did she do it?
She was sure she didn't.
Almost sure.
Pretty sure.
The cracks formed and doubt broke her open.
She couldn't remember.
What had she done to her daughter? In that moment when her hatred blacked out her reason?
Nothing.
She'd done nothing to Hanna.
It was Marie-Abbe Dufosset. She was the problem.
That fucking little French witch..."

The war between seven year old Hanna and her mother Suzette has begun and it is escalating until only one of them will remain.

This is not the Bad Seed and if you don't get that reference then you got issues that cannot be fixed in this blog. And by the way, the original black and white film not those crappy remakes. No, there is something more insidious about Hanna than the acts of a sociopath. Hanna is calculating and vindictive and takes an eerie pleasure in tormenting her mother. Her love for her father Alex is the other side of the coin for her. It is tough to separate the hatred for mother (or contempt) from the love for her father. It is the driving force behind all she does.

Suzette, as the novel moves forward is not just a loving, victimized mother. In time we see her selfishness, her cruelty and her joy at hurting her own child. Her driving force is not her love for husband but the fear that he may love anyone more than her. Suzette needs Alex to care for her and love her and give her a sense of worth. Sharing her husband with her own child is something she finds herself unwilling to do.

Baby Teeth has teeth. It has bite and is more than willing to sink itself into you and tear horrible chunks of emotion and fear out of you. It will have you both sickened by Hanna at times and also cheering for her to win. Or you will fear that for Suzette. But you will take sides and in the end, like Alex must do, you will choose between one or the other.

A really good read!

I didn't think I would be as creeped out by this book as I was. It was an interesting mix of tension regarding what would happen next, and disbelief at what was actually happening. Definitely a creepy read, and one that I could definitely see being made into a film.

I very rarely read a novel that truly creeps my out, but oh my goodness this book is crazy! Or I guess I should say Hanna is crazy. I was totally hooked from the first page to the very last and I know this novel is one that is going to stick with me for a while. The characters are perfect, the tone of the novel is spot on, and Stage's writing style is incredibly entertaining.

Let's start with Hanna's character. She is an odd little girl who felt sympathy for... at first. But then the novel takes a quick and dark turn, and I feel awful for Suzette's character. Stage's writing forces the reader's emotions into turmoil and I couldn't have loved that aspect more.

This novel is not for the faint of heart and I've definitely heard some mixed reviews, but I would highly recommend it if you love suspense novels with a scary twist. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for sending this novel in exchange for and honest review.

Rating 4/5

This book is every parent’s worst nightmare. It turns maternal regret and guilt on its head. I cringed the whole time I was reading it, but I could not stop turning the pages. It was like the horror movies you watch with your fingers over your eyes, just peeking through, but you love the scare so you won’t turn it off. Wonderfully entertaining, suspenseful, and stirring up feelings only a mother could understand, this book is a winner.

As soon as I finished Chapter 1, I knew I was going to be skimming a lot. There was just too much I didn't like about Baby Teeth. Hanna's voice didn't ring true because her vocabulary seemed too advanced for a seven year old. Her manipulations also seemed far beyond what a kid that age would be able to pull off. I also couldn't relate to her or her parents. Hanna was unlikable, her mother swung between whiny and guilt-ridden, and the dad was the king of denial. I honestly couldn't find much to like about the book except that it was pretty well written and carefully edited.

*ARC via netgalley*

Riveting, a daughter who manipulates anti a scary page turning point. Couldn’t put this book down.

Hated this book. I had no use for it. I never ever ever not finish a book, on this one I read about the first 7 chapters, skipped to the last 3. This book was a cross between "Bad Seed" and every bad child movie I have ever watched. There wasn't one likable character. The ending makes it feel like there may be another book coming out. Don't waste your time. Wow so bad! I understand there are people who believe that children are born bad, that's not up for debate, it's how you handle things that just blew me away in this book. I hate weak mothers and female characters in general and this one took the cake.

Received this book as an ARC for my honest review.

Baby Teeth starts out with seven-year-old Hanna at a doctor’s visit with her mother, Suzette. Hanna does not speak (and has never spoken a word in her life), and her parents have her in for another round of tests to see if any abnormalities show up. The reader quickly realizes while Hanna may be mute, she is very articulate with her thoughts. The chapters alternate between Hanna and Suzette’s perspective. As we are introduced to both characters we realize that Suzette is an exhausted mother trying to do the best for her difficult child. And exhausted is an understatement. Suzette is a stay-at-home mom who also home schools her daughter. She is worried that Hanna acts out on purpose, and doesn’t want her around. And Hanna…well…Hanna hates her mother.

When I first started reading this, I wondered if maybe Suzette was suffering from unwarranted paranoia. I mean, her young daughter couldn’t really want to get rid of her mother, could she? But right away we realize that yes, it’s true. Hanna feels like Suzette doesn’t really lover her. Hanna wants Suzette gone for good, and her father all to herself. Hanna is a master manipulator — the perfect angel for her father, while pushing her frazzled mother’s buttons when he is not around.

And then after a few chapters, the book gets really creepy.

I won’t say more here as I wasn’t expecting this turn so I don’t want to spoil it. But, yeah. Creepy for sure. I would go so far as to classify this book to go beyond psychological thriller and move slightly into the horror category.

A definite page turner. If the author wouldn’t have specified Hanna’s age, I would have guessed that she was around 13, not 7. (I even went back and checked on her age to make sure I wasn’t remembering wrong!) Hanna’s thinking, plotting, and manipulation to get rid of her mother is really intense. And poor Suzette has been living with Hanna with no breaks for so long, her sanity could snap at any minute.

If you’re looking for an intense, creepy, psychological read, Baby Teeth is the book for you.

When I got a copy of Baby Teeth in the mail, I was instantly intrigued. The cover was interesting and the description sounded pretty creepy. Then I read it and it was one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read.

The book follows Suzette, a mother who loves her daughter but is worn down by homeschooling and Hanna’s violent outbursts, mostly aimed at Suzette and hidden from Suzette’s husband. Hanna is incredibly sneaky & manipulative for a 7 year old. Oh yeah and she doesn’t talk. Unless it’s to tell her mom she’s the spirit of a witch who is there to kill her.

As a parent, this was hard to read. It was like all your worst nightmares coming true. A child you wanted who seems to want you out of the picture. The chapters from Hanna’s perspective were chilling and I felt so creeped out while reading this.

I would highly recommend this if you are looking for something kind of creepy to read for Halloween. I honestly think about this book every few weeks, so you know it’s good if I can’t stop thinking about it.

What a unique book! This kept me on my toes wondering just exactly what Hanna would do next. This takes Mommie dearest to the next level!

A horror novel with an absolutely killer cover. Unfortuntately the book itself did not live up to such heights. Baby Teeth falls into the "inexplicably evil children" genre of such classics as The Bad Seed, The Good Son, The Other, The Omen... man, there's a lot of movies about creepy kids, aren't there? But I can't complain – I love them all.

In Baby Teeth we're dealing with Hanna: seven year old only child of wealthy, liberal parents Suzette and Alex. Hanna is mute, despite having nothing physically wrong with her and clearly understanding spoken language. She'll even write out answers to school questions, though she won't use writing for normal conversational communication. Suzette is convinced that Hanna can talk, she just refuses to for reasons of her own. Suzette also becomes increasingly certain that Hanna hates her, wants her gone, and eventually is even attempting to murder her. Unfortunately Hanna never misbehaves in front of Alex, whom she adores, leaving Suzette to wonder the problems are real.

All of this perfectly suits me for some Halloween reading, and despite the problems I'm about to list, I do want to say that the story sucked me in and I had a hard time putting the book down; I think I read the whole thing in two days. I also liked that Suzette has Crohn's Disease. It's not often that you see a character with a disability where the book isn't about the disability, so that was refreshing.

My first problem is that the POV alternates each chapter between Suzette and Hanna. This instantly ruins any suspense the story would otherwise have – is Hanna evil? Does she hate her own mother? Is Suzette imagining everything? – since we know the answers to all these questions from the first page of Hanna's POV. Baby Teeth would be so much scarier if Hanna's chapters had simply been cut out.

The second major problem is that Baby Teeth can't quite decide if it wants to be a horror novel or a serious thriller. 90% of the book sits pretty firmly in the same territory as the movies I listed above, the kind of thing where there's no realism expected and no explanation offered (beyond silly ones like 'he's Satan's offspring!') for why the kid is evil. But then Stage bobbles the end, trying to swerve into a more sober examination of serious mental illness in children, which just doesn't fit at all with the story as told so far. (Also, "psychopath" is the term used by the specialists the parents eventually consult, though as far as I'm aware that's not a real diagnosis one can receive.) I personally am not offended by the horror genre's vilification of mental illness, but it simply doesn't work to mix the extremes of the trope with realism. In real life, those with serious disorders like schizophrenia are far more likely to be the victims of violence, and you can't acknowledge that for a chapter and then immediately swing back to "Now the little girl has a knife!!! Scary!!! :DD" Talk about mood whiplash.

Finally, the ending didn't work for me at all. I'm pretty sure Stage was going for a "the killer wasn't really dead after all!" type jump-scare which ends many a beloved slasher flick, but here it just felt like the story was unfinished. It wasn't a cliffhanger so much as abrupt and unresolved.

I was very much looking forward to reading Baby Teeth, and while overall I can't say it was a bad book, it could easily have been so much better.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2568176133

Creepy, creepy, creepy!!! This is a perfect read for the month of October. Suzette Jensen is happily married to Alex and they have a beautiful 7-year old daughter Hanna. The family looks idyllic from the outside but the secrets lying under the surface may put them in mortal danger. Hanna, for reasons doctors have been unable to diagnose, is mute. She communicates through gestures and facial expressions only. She adores her father but is cool and distant with her mother. She acts out, sometimes violently, when forced to go to school. Suzette strives to be the kind of mother that she herself didn’t have but Hanna’s behavior is beginning to wear her out. In addition, she is still recovering from the most recent of several surgeries she’s had to have for her medical condition. Suzette is feeling trapped and even threatened by her own daughter but will her quest to find help make things better or far, far worse?

This book will scare you and send chills down your spine but it will also challenge your view of the mother/daughter relationship and make you wonder what really goes on in the minds of children. I really liked Suzette from the beginning. Her medical condition makes her very vulnerable but she never gives up fighting and trying to improve as a person. She agonizes over the situation with her daughter and works hard to keep it from intruding into her relationship with Alex. I also really liked Alex, he is wonderful as a father and a husband, even if it takes him a little while to really acknowledge the issues his daughter has. Hanna may be beautiful but she is not a likable child. It seems to be her mission in life to torment her mother. As a mom myself, I found this child frightening and she kept me on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to happen next. I found this book to be a perfect fit for the time of year, scarier than I had anticipated and impossible to put down.

Baby Teeth is a rollercoaster of emotion - at turns shocking, frustrating, and terrifying. The characters and their flaws are on full display, pushing me way beyond my comfort level. Very few books make it off my nightstand but I read Baby Teeth every chance I got. I needed to see how the story ended, who survived, and how this story could possibly come to any sensible conclusion. Well done Zoje Stage. Thanks to St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Unnerving tale and extremely disturbing. Not my cup of tea, but it was well written and the premise different and interesting.

Baby Teeth certainly caught me surprise. Not so much the plot or characters, which was a slow but steady plan of attacks from the perspective of a 7-year-old girl Hanna to kill her mother, whom Hanna sees as a threat to her relationship with Daddy. What really hooked me was the prose--particularly Hanna's chapters, where the mind of a child comes alive with creative wordplay and visual prose. It was a delight to watch the words come together in such playful fashion.

The locale, Pittsburgh, also was a strong point. A perfect setting, well-crafted too. And the characters--Daddy Alex, Mommy Suzette, and Hanna the child--were wonderfully real. However, and this was a big however...

One thing that niggled at me was Hanna's muteness and how not a single institution or school who worked with her ever mentioned sign language as a communication option. In today's day and age, it's commonplace for parents and all schools to have a sign interpreter, so it was a little plot flaw that bugged me, but not enough to take away any stars.

Lastly, and I'm trying not to leave a spoiler, but I will say the ending frustrated me, leaving the reader completely suspended without a closing, but done with a typical horror-style open-endedness. We don't get closure, we don't know anything, really. But it's a borderline horror book (aren't all murderous kid books on the horror scale?), so I'll accept it.

If you love creepy kids (not in real life, but in fiction, hehe), you'll enjoy Baby Teeth.

The tense relationships between mothers and daughters are not uncommon in books focused on female characters. However, in Baby Teeth, Zoje Stage takes the tension and blows it into a full-on war between 7-year-old Hanna and her mother, Suzette. 

Suzette is married to the perfect husband, a Swedish-transplant who is one of Pittsburgh's most successful architects. He believes he's married to the perfect woman and has the perfect daughter. To him, little Hanna is nothing but darling and sweet and kind. But for Suzette, Hanna is anything but. 

For seven years, Suzette has put her promising interior design career on hold to raise her daughter and deal with her constantly-worsening Crohn's disease. But when Hanna still won't talk, with no medical reason why, Suzette is beginning to lose patience spending all day catering to her daughter. After all, since Hanna keeps getting kicked out of any school Suzette tries to enroll her in, Suzette has also taken on the burden of homeschooling. Meanwhile, her husband is in denial that there may be something more going on with Hanna  -- a deeper, darker reason why she keeps getting expelled from schools.

When Suzette gets her husband to agree to send Hanna to a school specifically for children with special needs, Hanna's thrown off. When she acts out at this school, unlike her previous ones, they don't expel her. Instead, they work with her on finding ways to make her happy and comfortable in an environment outside her home. Feeling defeated, Hanna ups her game -- not only against her new school (who, according to Hanna, is full of morons) but her mother, too. A mother who, with each chapter, is weighed down with the guilt of not knowing where she went wrong with raising her child.

Told in alternating points of view between guilt-ridden, terrified Suzette and whimsical but haunting Hanna, the cold war between mother and daughter builds to an explosive ending that I didn't see coming.

I really enjoyed this book, and definitely cringed at some of the things Hanna tried to do. Although I felt like there wasn't much of a plot in this book, it was just Suzette sharing her frustrations about her daughter and her daughter sharing her frustrations about her bad mommy.

Baby Teeth was perhaps the most disturbing book I have read in a long time. It was engaging and engrossing, but absolutely terrifying. It is the kind of book that makes you want to avoid having children - perhaps forever. The characters were well developed, the plot a touch unrealistic, and the tone a bit unexpected, but overall it was a decent read. It was a hard book to recommend because it was so disturbing, but I found the book engaging and alluring, although, it took me ages to read because I could not read such upsetting content in one sitting.
Thank you for letting me review the book and thank you for understanding.

Hanna is a creepy 7 year old kid who terrorizes her mother, and who her father thinks is a perfect little angel. One of those books you don't want to put down until you finish. I definitely would never want to babysit Hanna..