Book Review

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“She crawled up on my lap and whispered in her sweet voice, ‘I like hurting people, do you’ “?

                 Like usual, I picked this book out by the cover and didn’t read any of the description on the back, but it was listed as a thriller, so I jumped in. Christopher and Hannah have the perfect life, except for a child. Hannah has fertility issues, but they are currently in the processes of looking into adoption. Hannah is a nurse at a hospital where Chris is a surgeon.

                 One night, a toddler is found wandering the street, covered in blood, and is brought into the ER. Hannah is working that night, and when she gets home the next morning, she drops a hint to her husband that he should go look at the girl when he gets to work. I knew right away that Hannah and Chris would at least look into fostering the little girl. A couple days after the girl was admitted, they start to learn her story a little and find out that she is actually 6 years old and was severely abused, and malnourished. Chris formed a bond with the little girl, Janie, almost instantly. Chris desperately wanting Hannah to love the girl like he did, asked Hannah to come meet her one day. Janie did not take to Hannah like she had Chris, but after awhile warmed up enough to her, and they filed to become her foster parents while the cops searched for her birth mother.

                 Hannah and Chris had family time saved up that they planned to use when they adopted a baby, so they were both able to take time off to get Janie settled in. Janie had lots of therapy she had to go to so that was a big adjustment for them as well, but everything seemed to be going okay. Until Chris went back to work. Once Chris went back to work Janie started ignoring Hannah and pretending like she wasn’t even there. Janie would talk to strangers at the park, and would be so happy when Christopher came home, but wanted nothing to do with Hannah. When Chris and Hannah made an appointment with their therapist, she told them that b/c of the severe trauma Janie dealt with in her past at the hands of her mother, it isn’t a surprise that Janie doesn’t acknowledge Hannah, and had a  better bond with Christopher.

               

                This is where the book started to piss me off, and I mean really piss me off. Janie starts acting out but only when Chris is at work. When Chris returns home from work, Janie is a perfect angel so he doesn’t believe anything Hannah says about how bad Janie was during the day. There are all sorts of red flags to show that Janie is a devil child and Chris ignores every single one of them. He does nothing but defends Janie and thinks his wife is the one in the wrong. Sure, she isn’t always the victim, but there was plenty of evidence to show that Hannah wasn’t making this behavior up and instead of trying to believe his wife, he was convinced she was exaggerating.

               Perfect example of Chris siding with the demon child. Janie hid Hannah’s phone day b/c Hannah took something away of Janie’s. When Chris came home, Hannah told him he needed to tell Janie to give it back. Convinced that Janie didn’t take it and that Hannah misplaced it, he helped her look for it. He ended up finding it in Janie’s room under her bed. But where did he tell Hannah he found it?! Under the couch cushions….where Hannah had already looked, several times, so now she was convinced that she was even more crazy than she was. As someone who had her own battle with PPD this behavior infuriated me b/c this is how he was ALL THE TIME! Convinced Hannah that she was making things up, and that Janie was an angel. None of this helped with her PPD or insomnia that she had also developed since having the new baby that her and Chris were able to get pregnant with.

     

             I won’t give away the ending, but the last probably 100 pages or so make me so angry. I loved it, but I found myself cringing at the things Janie was doing to Hannah and yelling at the clueless husband who was taking the side of child that had only been in their home for a year, over his own wife and the safety of their biological child. Chris failed everyone, there were so many times he could have reported behavior or comments from Janie and didn’t. All the blood lost in this book falls on Chris’s shoulders.

          Some readers on Goodreads were angry b/c this plot line followed a couple other books, but I haven’t read those books, so I found the plot horrifying in the best way.