Sorry. You have very small veins.

PLOT SUMMARY:

Hanna is no stranger to dark thoughts: as a young child, she tried to murder her own mother. But that was more than sixteen years ago. And extensive therapy—and writing letters to her younger brother—has since curbed those nasty tendencies.

Now twenty-four, Hanna is living an outwardly normal life of domestic content. Married to real estate agent Jacob, she’s also stepmother to his teenage daughter Joelle. They live in a beautiful home, and Hanna loves her career as a phlebotomist—a job perfectly suited to her occasional need to hurt people.

But when Joelle begins to change in ways that don’t suit Hanna’s purposes, her carefully planned existence threatens to come apart. With life slipping out of her control, Hanna reverts to old habits, determined to manipulate the events and people around her. And the only thing worse than a baby sociopath is a fully grown one.

GRADE: B-

REVIEW:

This novel is the highly anticipated sequel to Baby Teeth. When we left Hanna at the end of the first book, she was sent to an institution for troubled girls – when we meet Hanna as an adult she’s a phlebtomist, where she uses her job as a means to exact pain whenever she feels stressed on her patients. One day she meets a widowed father with a young girl and soon she marries him and becomes a stepmother. Hanna lives a very structured and mundane life, but she’s happy, until her stepdaughter becomes pregnant. This event triggers her to the point that her past sociopathic tendencies reemerge. While I found this novel very fast paced and I did like adult Hanna a lot, I kind of expected more. What I mean is that child Hanna was way more deranged than adult Hanna, and I know that adult Hanna was trying to avoid ever having to go to prison, but I kind of wished that she would’ve been more dangerous if that makes sense? I did like how the novel ended – Hanna deserved to get rid of all those terrible people in her life.

If you read the first book you might like this sequel, although this book can be read as a standalone. I don’t know if this book was much of a thriller, so if you’re into thrillers where you’re worried about any of the characters dying, this isn’t that sort of thriller. I do enjoy Stage’s novels overall, but do feel that she fills her novels with too many mundane events and details that don’t really add to the story.

*Thank you so much to NetGalley & Thomas & Mercer for the digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

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