rmnedder's reviews
88 reviews

This book was creepy, and it was weird, and it was fantastic.
I was drawn in mostly by the title and the concept--I'm a sucker for the "normal person in a fucked up magical family" trope--and by the end I was blown away. It's a slow-burn creature horror with a weird concept that just works. The characters are all really interesting, dimensional, imperfect, and well-written, with complex and fucked up backstories that help tie everything together. There's a darkness, a ferality to the writing style and the main character's narrative voice that gives a great edge to the story. It's a little slow-paced towards the beginning, but it doesn't drag; it's a great slow-burn that helps create tension that builds and builds as the story progresses, and it eventually does pick up in pace (I'm not usually a fan of slow-burn, but it's just done so well here). 
My only note is that it's not explicitly stated when the story takes place; you can garner easily enough that it's not set contemporarily, between the way they talk about certain things and the absence of cell phones, but it's not clear exactly where the story is temporally. I don't mind it, actually; I think the vagueness contributes nicely to the tone of the story, but I can understand how some might find it irritating.
What Big Teeth is such a great debut, and I can't wait to read more from Rose Szabo. Fully recommend this for anyone looking for something spooky, unsettling, and just a little off-kilter. 

I will try to keep as spoiler free as I can, and I apologize for the length, but if anyone is looking for a thorough review, I offer you this. 

I will give this book credit where credit is due. The premise is interesting, the characters are somewhat well written, and the part of the book that centers on the grief of a daughter losing her father is actually written really well until the end of the book, which I’ll get to. 

Outside of this, though, this book felt very rushed and poorly planned. The first two thirds of the book was all set up—the conflict event mentioned in the abstract, her discovering the bedroom, happens over 200 pages in to a 320 page book, about 100 pages from the end—and the final third just travels at warp speed to cover the ground laid out for it. This book could have done better with either an additional 100 pages to expand the ending and give it room to breathe, or scrapping some of the build up in the beginning. A lot of plot details don’t feel anchored to anything relevant; they just kind of feel thrown in there for dramatic effect, and the ways they’re written into or out of the story feel arbitrary or, again, rushed. There are also a lot of problems that the main character could have solved by asking questions or looking things up online, considering that this is a contemporary book and cellphones do feature quite a bit in the story. 

I have the most issues with the ending. The big twist felt painfully predictable, and not in the way of a “well planned ending,” but rather through an unnecessary roundabout. The last ~30 pages feel unbelievably rushed, more so than the rest of the book; there’s no time for things to land properly, it’s just go go go. It makes the events of the ending feel forced and everyone is blindly rolling with it, instead of having them happen organically. The way in which events are described are confusing and can make you doubt what actually happened, not in the “fun morally grey ghost story” way, but in a way that feels like bad storytelling. Any great arc the author could have given the grieving daughter narrative gets thrown out the window by the main character’s choices, which feels really disappointing; why create this beautiful narrative and include these memories of her father if you’re essentially going to spit in its face at the end? 

Overall, this is a quick halloween read if you’re just looking for something fast and kinda spooky, but if you’re looking for a genuinely good and engaging read, I’d skip this one.