Early Review – What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo (4/5 stars)
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Paranormal/Horror
Length: 400 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: February 2, 2021
ISBN-13 : 978-0374314309
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: eGalley from NetGalley.com
Rating: 4/5 stars
“Eleanor Zarrin has been estranged from her wild family for years. When she flees boarding school after a horrifying incident, she goes to the only place she thinks is safe: the home she left behind. But when she gets there, she struggles to fit in with her monstrous relatives, who prowl the woods around the family estate and read fortunes in the guts of birds.
Eleanor finds herself desperately trying to hold the family together ― in order to save them all, Eleanor must learn to embrace her family of monsters and tame the darkness inside her.”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got an eGalley from NetGalley to review.
Story (4/5): This was an odd, but well done, book. Eleanor has spent the last seven years at a boarding school but flees home because of an…incident…at the school. The problem is she doesn’t really fit with her really odd family, who are very literally monsters. As she struggles to fit in a disaster happens and, at a loss, she contacts her French grandmother to help. However, her French grandmother is something else completely.
This is a dark story and a bit ambiguous at times. It does have some Lovecraftesque types of undertones as well (I feel like I am reading a lot of stories that draw influence from Lovecraft lately). For much of the book you are trying to figure out a lot of the family’s secrets. I found it engaging and liked it but it crossed the line of being just a bit too out there for me at points.
Characters (4/5): The characters are what pretty much make this story. Initially you don’t really know what kinds of monsters Eleanor’s family are; it’s pretty apparent that there are some werewolves but the others are more mysterious. Eleanor is intriguing because there is a lot of mystery behind why she was sent to boarding school and what made her leave. All of these characters are complex, intriguing and mysterious. I ended up enjoying them for the most part, although at times they were hard to relate to and by the end I still didn’t feel like I understood them well.
Setting (4/5): I could never really get a feel for the time frame the story takes place in. It seems to be in the 1950’s because they talk about The War a bit. It also seems to be set in a small European town and more specifically set at the mansion Eleanor’s family built in this town. The setting definitely influences the story because of the way Eleanor’s family has a somewhat symbiotic relationship with the town.
Writing Style (4/5): This is all told from Eleanor’s POV and is well written and easy to read. I found that the mysteries presented here kept me engaged and interested in the story. The pacing does lag at times and the ambiguity of what is going on can be a bit tough to figure out. You are pretty much dropped into this strange family and then left to wade through and figure everything out; it was well done but a bit confusing too. The book takes some strange and dark turns towards the end that were a bit much for me, but I enjoyed the creativity behind it.
My Summary (4/5): Overall this was an odd little book that I enjoyed but didn’t love. I did really enjoy unraveling these strange mysteries alongside Eleanor but that story is a bit slow and ambiguous at times. I loved the monsters introduced and enjoyed how things unraveled with finding out what Eleanor was but this was also a bit too “out there” for me. This is definitely a dark story about monsters and has some very Lovecraft overtones to it.
