Eat your heart out, Rhoda Penmark.
Baby Teeth is a 2018 psychological thriller by Zoje Stage. It's split between Suzette, a troubled woman struggling with motherhood, and her seven-year-old daughter Hanna, whose silence hides her developing plan for her mother.
It has no connection to Babyteeth.
Tropes:
- Abusive Offspring: Hanna is seven, but she takes pointed pleasure in emotionally torturing Suzette, in hitting and attacking her when she can, and finally tries to burn her alive.
- Abusive Parents: Suzette's mother. Suzette herself desperately wanted to subvert this, but the situation is more complicated.
- Agony of the Feet: Hanna leaves a pile of thumbtacks by her mother's bedside, sharp sides up, so Suzette steps on them when she gets up.
- Armor-Piercing Question: After a book of not speaking, Hanna asks Suzette, "Don't you miss me?" and if Suzette loves her enough.
- Ax-Crazy: Hanna's inner monologues reveal that she is constantly thinking about how much fun it would be to hurt or kill other people. She's also prone to biting, snarling and generally acting like a rabid dog.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: Hanna only lasted eight days in Frick School before getting kicked out for — among other things — killing the class goldfish.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: At the end of the book, Hanna resolves to become one. Since acting like a little psychopath got her put in a special boarding school where she can't hurt anyone, especially Mommy, she decides that in order to get out and get her revenge, she'll have to turn into "the best girl ever."
- Bittersweet Ending: After Hanna tries to kill Suzette twice, she is sent away to a boarding school equipped to deal with her issues where she can't hurt anyone, guaranteeing that Alex and Suzette will be free of her for at least a year, possibly longer. However, Hanna has learned absolutely nothing from the incidents, with her only regret being that she failed to kill her mother, and has secretly resolved to become even more cunning so she can get her revenge once she gets out.
- Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: Invoked and zigzagged. Suzette wants to break the cycle created for her by her mother, who was emotionally abusive and left her to suffer in severe physical pain for years rather than seeking treatment for her Crohn's disease. She struggles to contain her own anger and disdain towards Hanna, a lot of which is justified, some of which isn't.
- Deliberately Cute Child: Played with. Suzette admits that Hanna is objectively very cute, but she is also able to turn up her cuteness when she wants to fool Alex to her real plans.
- Desperate Plea for Home: After being in Marshes for about two weeks and hating it, Hanna phones her parents and begs to come home, promising to never be bad again. Suzette is briefly moved but believes, probably correctly, that Hanna is trying to manipulate them.Hanna: I want to come home! Don't you miss me?
- Early Personality Signs: At four years old, Hanna already shows signs of being malicious. She hides her mother's diamond earrings in her teddy bear and flushes them down the toilet.
- Elective Mute: Hanna is perfectly capable of speaking, but chooses not to, seemingly just to antagonize other people and especially her mother who pleads with her to say just one word. She only starts speaking in full sentences over the phone when she's begging to come home from the specialist boarding school she's been sent to, which she hates.
- Enfant Terrible: Hanna is defiant and violent to everyone except Alex, and eventually murderous towards Suzette.
- Expelled from Every Other School: Before she's even eight years old, Hanna has already gotten herself kicked out of three preschools and two kindergartens.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: Alex is Swedish and frequently drops words of his native language into English. He calls his wife "älskling" (loved one) and his daughter "lilla gumman" (sweetie).
- Green-Eyed Monster: In kindergarten, Hanna is jealous of a girl named Aria who has beautiful blonde hair, and imagines flaying her scalp off and wearing her hair as a wig.
- Hates Everyone Equally: Hanna loathes everyone she meets—teachers, other students, psychiatrists, doctors and especially her mother. The only person she loves is her father.
- Irrational Hatred: Ever since she was very little, Hanna has always hated her mother and tried to make her life miserable in any way possible. While Suzette genuinely loves Hanna (or did at one point), Hanna also hates everybody else but Alex for completely meaningless reasons.
- Jealous Romantic Witness: A particularly icky example. Hanna occasionally watches her parents have sex, and is extremely jealous that Suzette is "monopolizing" Alex.
- Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal: Alex has a hard time believing that anything could be wrong with his daughter. When the teachers at Green Hill Academy accuse Hanna of setting a trash bin on fire, he angrily demands a refund of tuition and storms out.
- Medication Tampering: Hanna finds her mother's pills which are used to treat Crohn's disease, empties them out, and fills them with flour. After Hanna has been sent away to the special school, Suzette discovers the tampering and realizes it's why she has been so sick, and it confirms to her that she did the right thing in sending Hanna away.
- No Social Skills: Hanna despises other children on principle and enjoys bullying them, seemingly just For the Evulz. Even when she's not actively trying to bully them, she has no idea how to interact with them. When a group of children are comparing how to wiggle their ears and curl their tongues, Hanna rolls her eyes back into her head, expecting the other children to be impressed, but instead they scream and run away.
- Oedipus Complex: Hanna explicitly views Suzette as competition for her father Alex's love, and plans to marry him when she's older. To be fair, she is seven.
- Off to Boarding School: A non-villainous example but after multiple murder attempts by Hanna, her parents send her to Marshes, a boarding school specifically for children with mental issues, for an unknown length of time that is expected to be one to three years. She hates it and begs to come home, but they don't let her.
- Orphan's Ordeal: Suzette is an adult (she's in her late twenties or early thirties), but her father died when she was very young and left Suzette alone with her abusive, narcissistic mother (who even Suzette herself admits seems to have been struggling with some severe mental illness after being widowed), and Suzette's mother also died before Suzette had Hanna. This leaves her alone with no friends or family support.
- Parents as People: As hard as Suzette tries, she finds it hard to love a daughter who hates her, resists all of her attempts at affection and tries to make her life miserable every second of every day.It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn’t love you back. No one could do it forever.
- Pyromaniac: Hanna got herself kicked out of Green Hill Academy for setting a trashcan on fire. Her inner monologue reveals that it's because she was trying to get rid of the ants attracted to the garbage.
- Symbolic Glass House: Suzette, Alex, and their malicious, psychopathic daughter Hanna all live together in a Swedish-inspired mansion that is extremely minimalistic and made entirely of glass.
- There Are No Therapists: Well, there are, but none of them have any idea how to treat or diagnose a girl like Hanna who is very intelligent but hates everyone, won't talk, and enjoys hurting others. The only half-decent therapist admits to Suzette and Alex how out of her depth she is.
- Too Dumb to Live: Alex spends most of the book oblivious or in denial about Hanna's psychopathic behavior, but he really starts becoming this after the thumbtack incident. Your daughter tried to kill your wife by putting thumbtacks beside her bed so she would step on them and then trying to enter her room with a hammer? Let's have a family holiday involving a bonfire and hand her a flaming stick! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?? Unsurprisingly, Hanna tries to kill Suzette again by using the stick to bat flaming embers at her. This is the final straw that makes Alex agree to send her to the specialist boarding school.
- Trademark Favorite Food: A girl in Hanna's kindergarten class named Aria loves fruit punch so much that she refuses to drink milk or water. Hanna tricks her into drinking a glass of water mixed with red paint.
- The Voiceless: Hanna is mute, though she appears to gain the ability to speak when "possessed". She's also not a Cute Mute.
- Wham Line: When Hanna finally speaks, she asks Suzette if Suzette loves her enough. After so much abuse and several murder attempts, Suzette replies "Not enough."
