Cutting Teeth: A Novel
One of the most anticipated debut novels of 2014, Cutting Teeth takes place one late-summer weekend as a group of thirty-something couples gather at a shabby beach house on Long Island, their young children in tow.
Nicole, the hostess, struggles to keep her OCD behaviors unnoticed. Stay-at-home dad Rip grapples with the reality that his careerist wife will likely deny him a second child, forcing him to disrupt the life he loves. Allie, one half of a two-mom family, can't stop imagining ditching her wife and kids in favor of her art. Tiffany, comfortable with her amazing body but not so comfortable in the upper-middle class world the other characters were born into, flirts dangerously, and spars with her best friend Leigh, a blue blood secretly facing financial ruin and dependent on the magical Tibetan nanny everyone else covets. Throughout the weekend, conflicts intensify and painful truths surface. Friendships and alliances crack, forcing the house party to confront a new order.Cutting Teeth is about the complex dilemmas of early midlife--the vicissitudes of friendship, of romantic and familial love, and of sex. It's about class tension, status hunger, and the unease of being in possession of life's greatest bounty while still wondering, is this as good as it gets? And, perhaps most of all, Julia Fierro's warm and unpretentious debut explores the all-consuming love we feel for those we need most, and the sacrifice and compromise that underpins that love.BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
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.
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.
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.
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