“Maybe the machine could see the words she never spoke.”

From Zoje Stage’s Baby Teeth.

Even though she was raised in a hostile environment, when Suzette met and married Alex, she thought that she had left all that harmful negativity in the past; however, the couple’s nonverbal 7-year-old daughter, Hanna, has turned Suzette’s life into a complicated, taxing mess… but with a more sinister twist.  While Hanna is a sweet, loving, and mostly-respectable girl when her father is around, she is vindictive, violent, and hateful when alone with Suzette.  Suzette feels like her world is spiraling out of control as she tries to be a good mother, manage/control Hanna, and battling recovery from a recent flare-up from Crohn’s Disease.  After the latest batch of doctors and tests have confirmed that Hanna can talk, but does not, Suzette tries to convince Alex to enroll their daughter in school, just so she can have a few hours away from Hanna.  This sets Hanna, who already resents her mother’s disruption of her relationship with her father, off on a warpath against Suzette.  Hanna begins to speak to Suzette, claiming that she is a young French witch that was put to death centuries ago; this launches Suzette and Hanna into a battle that tests a mother’s sanity and shows a daughter’s true, malicious intentions.

Stage’s novel is terrifying and darkly captivating.  The bouncing back-and-forth in narration between Hanna and Suzette allows both sides to express their personal fears and motivation.  As a psychological thriller, it is reminiscent of Gaslight and other similar stories, but the most chilling factor comes from Hanna’s character development and the terrifying possibility of how evil a child can be.  There are some elements that seem very intense and random as they take place, but they play perfectly into the scary narrative as a whole.  Baby Teeth is a twisted and terrifying story that is impossible to put down.