Baby Teeth

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Getting snowed in at a luxurious, rustic ski chalet high in the French Alps doesn’t sound like the worst problem in the world.

More than just a story about a creepy kid, Baby Teeth is a condemnation of modern American parenting and an intense examination of the circumstances that create monstrous children–who will grow to be monstrous adults–and the responsibility borne by the child, her parents, and even society at large. They had a tense dinner, and Hanna decided that she could make Alex dislike Suzette even more if she made her ugly.Estranged from her own mother, Suzette is determined to raise her beautiful daughter with the love, care, and support she was denied. His eyebrows needed a trim and Suzette struggled to maintain eye contact with him with his nose hairs on such display.

Seeing Hanna finally getting help, really seeing the true side of Suzette not wanting to have Hanna around again. With Zoje Stage’s background in filmmaking and scriptwriting, I can definitely see how Baby Teeth came about. One such subtle detail was Alex's unwillingness to take on parental responsibilities — even in times of extreme crisis.The constant stress is wreaking havoc on Suzette's health, so she redoubles her efforts to locate a school that will accept her troubled child. In a “bad seed” story, the mother is almost always the first to realize something is wrong; the fathers are absent or oblivious. When it’s decided that he absolutely must run this errand, a long conversation about how Alex can prepare Suzette to defend herself ensues. This puts Suzette at odds with her husband, Alex, as he rarely witnesses Hanna’s bad behavior first hand and, as such, has difficulty believing Suzette’s accounts of the things Hanna does.

Unnerving and unputdownable, BABY TEETH will get under your skin and keep you trapped in its chilling grip until the shocking conclusion. They threw the drawing into the fire, but when Suzette spilled wine on herself, Hanna began chanting a curse and tossed coals at her with a stick. She let the woman take her hand, even though she didn’t want to go back to moody Mommy and another suffocating room.

At first, I sympathized with Suzette, a severely ill woman stuck at home with a delinquent child no school will accept. Because this novel, like the complex task of parenting itself is rich in questions and light on answers. Hanna sat with her elbow on the chair’s armrest, head on her hand, absorbed and expressionless like she became in front of the TV. I found myself frustrated with some of the parenting decisions, but even so it was impossible not to feel for these people. It was Walpurgis, and Alex decided that they could turn the Swedish holiday into an exorcism of Marie-Anne.