Parents should protect their children while also loving them unconditionally. But what can happen when instead of the innocent creature that’s expected, they’re gifted with a being who’s more trouble than they’re worth? In other words, what if in their place is someone so monstrous that their parents have no choice but to feel helpless around them?

Zoje Stage’s novel Baby Teeth answers this question through the story of a woman named Suzette. She tries doing all she can to be a good mother to her 7-year-old daughter, Hannah. They never bond the way parents and children are meant to, however. This is largely due to the fact that mute Hannah would rather communicate in ways that make her mother worry. To everyone else, Hannah appears as a sweet and innocent girl. She is able to evade suspicion until she starts planning ways to get rid of her mother permanently. That is when more of her true nature is brought to the surface.

Stage does a great job in wording the horrors of a mother scared of her own child in a way it’s realistic yet also something a parent would never want to experience themselves. Suzette is a woman readers can sympathize with because not unlike the mothers in thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby and We Need to Talk About Kevin, she feels she’s alone in this terrifying situation. It’s easy to be there with her as she grows frustrated with trying to be a good mother to a disturbed child. Her relationship with Hannah is quite unnerving, but she still desperately does what she can to form a connection.