Cutting Teeth
A Novel
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3.4 • 19 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Jaw-dropping ... A darkly comic send-up of motherhood.” —People
“With devourable writing and pitch-perfect humor, Cutting Teeth is a sharp, original, wickedly astute look at the sting of modern motherhood.” —Ashley Audrain, New York Times bestselling author of The Push
New York Times bestselling author Chandler Baker's Cutting Teeth is a witty, thrilling story of parental love that asks: is there anything a mother won’t do for her children?
Darby, Mary Beth, and Rhea are on personal quests to reclaim aspects of their identities subsumed by motherhood—their careers, their sex lives, their bodies. But their children disrupt their plans when an unsettling medical condition begins to go around the Little Academy preschool: the kids are craving blood.
Then a young teacher is found dead, and the only potential witnesses are ten adorable four-year-olds.
Soon it becomes clear that the children are not just witnesses, but also suspects . . . and so are their mothers.
As the police begin to look more closely, the children’s ability to bleed their parents dry becomes deadly serious. Part murder mystery, part motherhood manifesto, Cutting Teeth explores the standards society holds mothers to—along with the ones to which we hold ourselves—and the things no one tells you about becoming a parent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Baker (The Husbands) takes readers on a stomach-dropping emotional roller coaster in this suspenseful and darkly comic tale of motherhood and murder. At first, the parents of RiverRock Church's private preschool students are overjoyed when young Miss Erin Ollie, with her perpetual smile and PhD in child development, joins the faculty. However, their initial enthusiasm wanes as some of the four-year-olds in her class begin exhibiting a morbid fascination with biting and consuming blood. Before long, Miss Ollie is found dead in the school's supply room with a pair of scissors protruding from her neck, and police zero in on her students and their protective mothers as the primary suspects. Three of those mothers narrate: there's Rhea, who sells homeopathic remedies online; Darcy, once a high-powered executive, now an overqualified crisis manager for the county; and Mary Beth, who has dedicated her entire life to parenting her two daughters. Baker's descriptions of the joys and trials of raising children bolster the mystery at the book's core. With winning cynicism, she delivers a wicked thriller that doubles as a glimpse at motherhood's dark underbelly.
