Dear Hanna by Zoje Stage ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

 

Dear Hanna is a really creepy book with a main character who manipulates everyone around her and looks at the world totally differently than a normal person.  It's a sequel to Baby Teeth which is about Hanna as a child. She's 24 now and from the outside looks like a normal person.  But when her innermost thoughts are shown, we are quickly convinced that she is not a normal everyday person.  

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

August 2024; Thomas & Mercer; 978-1662521003
audio, ebook, print (331 pages); psychological thriller

When Hanna was 7 years old, she tried to kill her mother.  Now she's 24 and married to an older man with a teen-age daughter.  She loves her career as a phlebotomist—a job perfectly suited to her occasional need to hurt people. She spends a lot of time writing letters to her brother Goose and her letters as well as Goose's letters are part of the story and the author uses them to show Hanna's thought process.  From the outside, it appears that Hanna has grown up and with intense therapy has left behind her sociopathic ways.  She along with her husband and teenage daughter have a good life together until her stepdaughter begins to change in ways that Hanna doesn't approve. It's also very apparent that her husband is more concerned with the happiness of his daughter than he is the happiness of his wife. All of this puts Hanna in a spot where she is forced to go back to her old ways of thinking as she works to regain her place as the central and most important person in the family. ' And the only thing worse than a baby sociopath is a fully grown one.’

Hanna is a very multi-dimensional character.  She appears fairly normal on the surface but she constantly evaluates her responses so that she will be better perceived.  If her real feelings had come out, she'd scare people away.  There's a big twist at the end of the story that I didn't see coming and that made it even more enjoyable for me.  Hanna is a psychopath with strange ways of looking at life and the people around her - but she is a great well-written character and actually very likable.  The author did a fantastic job of explaining the two sides of Hanna - the normal acting outside that she showed to the world and the deep and unsettling thoughts that controlled her mind.  This was a great read! 

Even though Dear Hanna is a sequel to Baby Teeth, it can be read as a stand-alone with no confusion.

Buy Dear Hanna at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is two hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.   

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