Cutting Teeth: A Novel

This started off so strong with such potential. I hoped it had gone into a concept about how children are like blood sucking vampires to us mothers. I myself call my kids leeches. Or this could've been a fun child vampire story... unfortunately it was something else. It tried to explain how mothers would give their all for their children, to keep them healthy and protected at any cost. Yet the concept didn't become clear until this end.

I followed along for the first 30% with high hopes and then got lost. All three mothers are different and relatable but too similar and I couldn't keep up with which one of three was giving the POV. It got very jumbled for me.

It starts off with all these children starting to bite. A lot. Then their teacher is found murdered in the school and the only witnesses are the kids. Soon after that the children were diagnosed with Renfield's Syndrome (obsession of drinking blood) due to biting and sucking the blood of their parents or licking band aids.

Wait what? If my kid came to me asking for an O positive snack, NEGATIVE. Absolutely not.

Then the adults storylines got so confusing. Someone slept with someone they shouldn't have. One had a kid stealing things and hiding them. Potentially including items from the teachers crime scene. Each of the three mothers has secrets of what happened the day of the death and their children were suspects.

WHY are parents ALLOWING their kids to bite and drink their blood, just to calm them. There was too much mention of gushing period blood for me personally. We know how uncomfortable it is, I didn't expect to be listening to the audiobook and hear about it while driving to daycare.

I got extremely impatient to get to the end of this.

Then I finally did and WHAT? The killer is not who I expected.

There was no explanation to why all these children went nuts.

It was all dragged out so far. I feel like it would have been better with half the content.
If this wasn't a bookclub pick I would have DNF halfway in.

A Brooklyn playgroup plus their spouses and one nanny goes to Long Island for a short vacation together and drama ensues. Together the playgroup characters capture what it feels like to be a modern day parent in the urban United States: there is baby lust, difficult pregnancies, so much anxiety, a renegotiation in marriage, financial stresses, mom wars and jealousies, gender issues- both among parents and children- the whole deal. I don't think the author left anything out. I think that it very accurately captures the state of parenthood right now. This is not what it was like for previous generations, and (let's hope) not what it will be like for future generations.

My favorite part of the novel is the Tibetan nanny that grounds the whole story by being a reminder of the difference between things that matter and things that ultimately don't matter. Of course, in real life as in the novel, this reminder often doesn't stop us from experiencing the pain of our personal dramas.