Our Take

Zoje Stage arrived with Baby Teeth as a debut that announced itself loudly — a Goodreads Choice Award nominee for horror in 2018 and a word-of-mouth sensation that built its reputation one unsettled reader at a time. It's easy to see why. Stage's dual-perspective structure is the engine that makes the whole thing run: Suzette's chapters are tense and claustrophobic, the experience of a woman slowly losing credibility in her own home, while Hanna's are something else entirely — calculating, darkly funny, and deeply unsettling in the way only a child narrator can be. What keeps Baby Teeth from being pure shock value is how seriously Stage takes both women. Suzette is not a hysteric, and Hanna is not simply a monster — she's a child with a terrifyingly coherent internal logic, and Stage never lets you forget that. The novel sits in genuinely uncomfortable territory around maternal ambivalence and the social pressure on mothers to love unconditionally, no matter what that love costs them. Readers who devoured Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl for its domestic psychological warfare will find familiar territory here, and anyone who was disturbed by Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin will recognize the same willingness to go somewhere most fiction won't. A propulsive, deeply unsettling read that's difficult to put down and harder to shake.