This “technically”
well-written novel was pointless, excruciatingly elongated, and suffered from
multiple personality disorder. It couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted
to be a horror story, a psychological thriller, or a serious study of
interpersonal relationships.
In the end, it turned
out to be none of those--it was just another Hallmark Channel Movie of the Week
about a dysfunctional family.
The plot is simple
enough: a young couple has a daughter who doesn’t speak and is having behavior
problems. That’s it. That’s all the book is about. No real resolution, no real
reason. Only a billion pages about them dealing with this
daughter and the mother changing her mind every other day.
Monday: “Should we take
her to a shrink?”
Tuesday: “She was so
good today, though.”
Wednesday: “Maybe we
should take her to see somebody?”
Thursday: “She smiled
today, so she’s okay.”
Friday: “How about we
call a psychiatrist?”
Saturday: “Well, maybe
tomorrow.”
Sunday: “Should we have
her lobotomized, burned at the stake, and the ashes thrown to the wind?
And back to Monday: “She
finished her vegetables, so she’s actually normal again!”
The father is painted as
an indecisive candy-ass (and I’m a bit tired of that, too) who is in constant
denial about his little “lilla gumman”
(that’s the kid). The father is a Swede and the book makes a big deal out of
it--even going so far as to let us know they pronounce their last name as Yensen although it’s Jensen. The whole “Swedish phrases”
thing got a little cloying after a while, too, and there was no reason for it
save a little backyard firepit ceremony on Walpurgis
Night which could have just as easily been a backyard marshmallow roasting on
any other fall evening and saved me from having to figure out what “Farmor and Farfar” or “älskling” meant.
The father’s role was
this:
“She stabbed you with a
fork? It must have slipped out of her hand.”
“She spit in your
cornflakes? Well, it’s flu season, she didn’t mean it.”
“She came at you with a
blowtorch and a pair of pliers? She was just trying to help with the grill.”
Hyperbole on my part? Not really--these
things happen over and over and over again in the book until it just becomes
almost too much to bear.
This novel began as Rosemary’s Baby, switched over to Audrey Rose, made a detour into Sybil, came back to “The Bad Seed,” and
then slid into “Dennis the Menace Goes To Area 51” or
whatever’s playing on Lifetime this month.
How this novel ever
became the #1 New Release in Horror Fiction on Amazon mystifies me. It’s not
horror. It could have been--might have been--and should have been.
Zoje Stage is an exceptional
writer, but she missed the mark with this one. If she’d continued writing Baby Teeth in the same vein in which she
began, left out the padding, and kept up the pace, this could have been a
dynamite horror tale.
I didn’t like it; it
missed the mark and the ending was an anti-climax that made me feel cheated.