the underlying horror of the story is the daughter and mom striving for daddy’s approval for SOME reason despite his inadequacies as a husband and father
I’m sick of the baby horror where all the torture is on the mother. Where’s the horror where the father is tormented and abused? Women have been gaslighted both in and out of fiction a million times in horror at this point it’s lazy.
@@BooksRebound I just watched this a few days ago and I'd never heard about it before, strange that I've seen it come up multiple times since. But yes, it's a greatly unsettling short about a dynamic that is pretty much never explored.
How about the movie Joshua? Granted it's only one of the few, but in the end the dad (played by Sam Rockwell) got all the blame for his mom and wife's demise (when in truth its his son, Joshua, who orchestrated their tragedy) , and he's like the only one who knows that Joshua is a conniving little shit and no one believes him. IDK. It's the only movie I can think of where the dad gets tortured and gaslighted by a monster child.
In Nutshell by Ian McEwan (had to read it for school 🤮) there is a sex scene told from the perspective of an unborn fetus…and yes, it’s as awful as it sounds
i was watching this video with growing concern what the actual fuck is wrong with the author AND the people allowing this book to exist the sex + racist undertones (swedish = perfect versus the gay latino comment) + blatant ableism THIS IS DERANGED
Y'know what would have been a great twist? If the dad had been playing dumb all along and he knew what was going on but he enjoyed tormenting his wife with their daughter
It's that not what happens? By the end of Cindy's video, I am thinking it's going to be revealed he was the truly evil one all along and that's where the daughter got it from, because surely no one can be that stupid.
As a Swed I just wanted to let you all know that for all the stereotypical weird Swedish things the author decided to put in this book, she got one thing right. Swedish men ARE this annoying. And dismissive. Ill give them credit for that
As someone who works with kids, there is a correct way to respond to this behavior even when the children involved are NOT possessed by a french witch. Like a reasonable adult should still NEVER let a kid print out naked pictures and have free reign of the internet??? Protect your kids and your privacy people?? Some children have behavioral issues, don’t know any better, or have been exposed to fucked up shit by other adults. Even if the husband thought his child was an angel, as a parent, he should be concerned about her??? Where is the logic?
These stories that have the daughter being all nice to the dad but torturing the mom always have these weird misogynistic undertones. Hell, even overtones.
I realize I probably shouldn't judge without reading it for myself but I was genuinely surprised that this is a critically acclaimed book because it sounds genuinely awful.
@hachi7100 yes and? the point stands, the author chose to write her that way. it's all too familiar to disabled people (myself included) to be framed as though we are intentionally being difficult, which this fictional child IS, but that’s not realistic, and thus comes off as this "disabled kids are evil" mentality? (i'm sorry if i explained poorly)
@@so_far_away im sorry this is a horror book? What are you expecting a world of rainbows and roses where nothing bad ever happens. What would've been your ideal ending the mom letting herself get killed by that demon child because "oh no it's abelist to defend yourself" I'm so confused on why you read a book with this premise? Or do you excuse all murderers and psychopaths because you think they have a disability?
So. This is a book about a neurodivergent 7-year-old, except she's not actually neurodivergent she's just faking it to be cruel, abusing her mother despite being, again, a 7-year-old, because her mother did something genuinely frightening to her and she was traumatized, and also meanwhile there's a school for special needs kids that describes the disabled kids in extremely condescending and offensive ways. Cool cool cool, cool mix of things to have in your book. I REALLY hope this author doesn't have children
Yeah seriously, like I don't plan on ever having kids but I hate that this kid is villainized so heavily when her mom is verbally abusing her kid and her dad is the sack of shit he is
@@zvikomboreromukamba3389 why too young? Both ICD11 and DSM-5 list childhood onset of conduct disorder as the behavior starting before the age of 10. She also has been showing the behavior for years, so the ≥12 months criteria is fulfilled.
Alternate reading where the husband is a the real villain, the kid is neurodivergent and trying in a maladaptive way to please the more volatile parent while communicating something is very, very wrong, and the mom is just gaslit into a stupor.
Yes! A lot of what Hannah is doing is pretty advanced for a 4-7 year old. There are some things I've seen kids like this do, the barking, oppositional behavior, manipulation, etc. But the French, pretending she was possessed, the weird dead people collage, that way too farfetched
I don't get why y'all are making fun of that line when the narrator immediately acknowledged how stupid it was to say that, it was clearly intended that the mother was rambling things that didn't make sense out of shock, can't y'all read?
@@flowflower2816 Considering the fact that he is such an absolutely nothing of a character who seems to only exist to be fought over for no reason by his wife and literal baby, we are justified in roasting the statement. Seriously, tell me anything substantial about this man's personality that doesn't involve being dismissively absent or blatantly Swedish.
@@withcindy I’m severely out of the loop with her other than her being awful. I couldn’t finish Harry Potter cause I really dislike her writing. So uh… what’s up with her now?
For me, my rage quit was when the mom was mentally complaining that because of her Crohn’s, she had to eat a salad while they had grilled chicken. Even an inch of research would have informed this author that those of us without colons, or shortened guts, tend to not be ABLE to eat salad because it doesn’t digest and causes obstruction. Grilled chicken is one of my safe food. (I have Crohn’s, too, so the depiction made me really upset).
@@withcindy No, she is an American, a person form sweden would know that the important thing for our culture is never sitting beside a stranger on the train. Standing in line. Fika is of course very important, so that is true. I don´t think a person that actually did know anything about being swedish would take Abba as a band that was so important. I mean We have Robyn as an artist, witch would be a better name for a babysitter. But even if Robyn is famous in lots of countrys, she is not as famous for being swedish as Abba is.
overlooked detail is the fact that it frames being nonverbal (a trait often found in autistic kids) as something that children just choose to be for the sake of being difficult for their parents. i'm an autistic person who experiences occasional speech loss, meaning certain situations will prevent me from verbal communication. nonverbal autistics, meanwhile, are not capable of verbal communication, ever. this is something that's not even fully understood in the autistic community, hence the amount of people who describe speech loss as "going nonverbal" because they assume it's a thing that comes and goes and not a constant trait. honestly, i could make a lot of points about how hanna reads as a demonized stereotype of autistic kids, but instead i'll say it would've been much more interesting if the book was explicitly about a horrible ableist mother losing her mind over normal autistic behavior instead of all that just being subtext.
Willful withholding of speech is real though. If a child knows their parent(s) want them to speak, sometimes they just won’t. ButI agree with your point 100%. Framing this child as autistic/special needs when they are just malicious is horrible representation.
Honestly this book feels like it was ghostwritten by my mom?? From the "my kid took away my freedom" to the "my kid fucks things up on purpose to test my patience" to the "my autistic kid doesn't communicate on purpose to spite me" and the "feeding and clothing my child but never showing any affection, wondering what went wrong when they start to resent me, then ultimately concluding that it's totally their fault and blaming them for everything" it's disturbingly too close for comfort and I am certain that if I ever met the author in real life I'd probably feel compelled to beat her up
The whole nonverbal thing was super fked. Like, a LOT of people have mutism or selective mutism and it’s NOT a choice to be an ass. There’s being silent to fk with people in the middle of an argument, and then there’s literally having a mental disorder that makes it hard and/or terrifying to verbally communicate.
yep, im selectively mute, always got in trouble for being stubborn or shutting down. it wasn't too bad since i could/can force some speech if im scared (and it's for this reason that im still scared of adults at age 18), but regardless if id known i was autistic growing up, i doubt id have hated myself less, because id still have been regarded as "difficult" just for being anxious.
This to me this sounds like if someone who don´t like children wrote a horror story but her best idea was: "child with special needs fakes it for attention", but then made the child have the mind of an adult and hate the mother to justify some random abuse...the mother on this book sounds like a woman who would acuse her daughter of wanting to steall her man. also wtf with the husband lol
I read the book (well, half of it, I gave up finally) and a lot of Hannah's behaviours mimick the mentally disabled/autistic kids my mum deals with in special needs school she works in. I really hated the book, because it felt a lot like what you described.
Ikr? This bugged the heck out of me because it sounds like a book written by an Autism Mommy Martyr who makes no effort to understand or accommodate their child, and then assumes the child's combative behavior and meltdowns are the child deliberately, maliciously punishing them. Rather than it being their nervous system overloading from the constant stress of being pathologized, blamed and punitively corrected for normal ND behavior. Things like, "Well, you can write so you must be able to talk but are refusing just to drive me crazy," is such a "me, me, me, everything is about me" way of interpreting a ND child's actions. And everything Hannah does is presented that way, with her internal monologue "proving" this awful, narcissistic way of looking at autistic children's struggles correct. It makes me wish I had a copy of this book so I could huck it at the wall.
I just don't understand how Suzette didn't divorce her husband, he is one of the most frustrating book characters I've had the displeasure of knowing about
Personally, I’m just curious about where all these clueless dunderf*cks keep coming from and why women in these sorts of stories keep marrying them. Look, I get that love can be quiet blind at times, but there are some faults that (unless you’re really trying) you just can’t ignore.
The whole book just makes me feel like the author hates disabled people, wants to hurt children or is a pdf file, and has a pick-me complex wanting to impress men.
exactly my thought. This jsut screams hidden pedophila to me... Any story can do perfectly fine without it and still dish out a lot of shock value. The person who wrote it, the person who edited it, and the person who agreed to publish it have a problem, imo
@@flowflower2816 They fucking should have way before this point but tbh I'd be concerned the kid would barricade them or just the mom in the room and then set the house on fire...
My thoughts: • initially, the mum shows incredible patience and does her best to parent The Gremlin, props to her • she's riddled with internal ableism though • the horror element of the story is having a husband who believes a 7 year old gremlin over his wife • children are uncannily smart but also dumb but surely no 7 year old has that level of malice and intelligence • this is a weird book
To be honest, I think that they just forgot to add the last plot twist to the book which was that the husband was a master gaslighter/manipulator all along.
The part where the kindergarten teachers tell the dad what Hannah's been doing and doesn't believe them??? omg it's so accurate. There was a little girl in my after school preschool group who was like this: dad thought she could do no wrong, didn't believe the several adults who told him about what she was doing. And just pulled her out of the program.
Holy crap, the Mum needs to go " okay, I'm leaving you alone with our daughter for a month and we'll see how she acts for you." And then never come back home.
9:37 cindy staring straight into my soul while the audiobook obnoxiously goes *BE BE BE GWAH GUA* is my new aesthetic and no i won't be explaining any further
My mom is a teacher and has taught in multiple schools designed for troubled children, and there has NEVER been a child who was THIS NASTY on that frequent of a basis. Were there the odd freakouts that demonstrated similar behavior to the child in the book? Definitely. However, she has yet to encounter a child this vindictive and spiteful. There were two kids who would "play" with me by biting my ankles and they were still better behaved than this. Damn.
this book sounds like what's going on in the head of a mom who abuses her child. Like when there are bruises on the child, she would assume that the child sneakily did that to herself to set her up and whatnot.
Honestly, if the plot twist was that her mother was emotionally abusing/neglecting her the whole time and made up all these stories about Hanna due to having ableistic tendencies towards her, it would have made the story so much better.
Not to mention how the entire “rivalry” between the mother and child was started by the mom force feeding Hannah. But the book tries to make Hannah as despicable as possible so you don’t see her as a victim of two idiot parents and don’t feel bad when the mom fights her back. It’s very transparent. Personally, I’m all for Team Little Gremlin to keep pretending to be French and throwing carrots at her mother.
Yeah I swear she sounds like my abusive mother talking about my younger sister and brother. How they’re so ‘manipulative’ and my father was choosing them over her
Rant videos are fun because A) Hearing Cindy recount the insane plots of the books she reads is endlessly funny B) Cindy’s snarky comments are always delivered flawlessly
I hated when they toured the art school and the mom judged all of the artwork in the school which was made by literal children... When she re iterates through the whole book that her own kid doesn't/won't draw a single thing ever. The consistent elitism and ableism of the parents was so strange and went pretty much unaddressed and wasn't really thematically relevant by the end. They gave off this vibe of "my child may have behavioral issues but at least she's not learning disabled (or, as the father himself said, r*tarded)." While the parents have a lot of regrets it doesn't feel like they ever have to actually reconcile with the way their perfectionism, egos, and elitism have prevented them from properly raising or handling their daughter. It's ambiguous but they kind of get a happy ending anyway where they get to "go back to the way they were before Hanna" so it doesn't feel like they learned anything or had to confront anything about their mindsets at all. Mostly the mom just gets to be vindicated. Also if Hanna genuinely does suffer from psychopathy/delusions/etc. then I really question the choice to villainize her within the story and also make comparisons to the kid from "The Omen" in the marketing. It's so stigmatizing and parts of the book even acknowledge that psychopathy is a genuine mental illness but they don't treat it with the same respect that Suzette's PTSD is treated with at all. Nowhere even close. For all the scary things Hanna did, I ended up feeling bad for her, because when it comes down to it, she is a mentally ill child and there's nothing evil about that... It's complicated and sad and difficult to handle but it is not evil. Just wished that either the author had gone with an actual possession storyline or treated Hanna's condition with more respect. I say all this but mostly I was just kind of bored by the book lol
like sure there’s the weird origin story where Hanna wants to “test” her mom to see if she’s a good one or smth like that but even that aint kept straight 💀 it goes from that (which was honestly a cooler motive. but my bar is very low for this book so thats not saying much) to wanting Alex’s attention. They’re doing all this over a Swedish man
I have not read the book and do not know the author, so I don't want to imply anything about them, but I can't help but notice how similar a lot of the writing sounds to Those Kind of Parents with neurodiverse children. Like, the selective mutism, the growling/barking, the humming/singsonging during studying, even the difference in behavior in other environments and biting other kids (overloads anyone?), all can be signs of being neurodiverse and specifically autistic. I doubt it's intentional but it very much reads like a mommy blogger talking about how her child is only showing symptoms to make her life hell (and the father ignoring all of it also matches that).
Yeah literally the "she can speak but chooses not to" I immediately thought about selective mutism and how this is just an ablist way to describe something that's not a "choice"
“Can you spell fucking idiot?” 😂I wish I read this book with the narration to traumatize myself more. This book will never leave my psyche for all the wrong reasons
My son has extreme speech delay and one day he went to my parents' house and just stared at a wall terrified and then said Ghost. That was literally like his sixth word. My parents moved. This is a really ableist book though. I actually find the character of the Dad way more realistic than the mum.
That's what I thought while reading the book, there're kids with issues similar to Hannah's (minus being manipulative pos) and it's not cool to use it as a set up for a horror imo.
Maybe it's just the PTSD-talking, but this is reading less like "demon spawn child" and more "demonizing an autistic/neurodivergent children vicariously through an 'evil' child" vibes. Is that just me? Am I the weird one?? The things they say just rings too close to how people talk about autistic/neurodivergent children. IDK, but listening to someone riff on a ridiculous book is still fun anyway, lol ps: omelette du fromage
@@thecatlurking If the book was actually well written that would have been a good twist, similarly like the turning of the screw, where the ghosts can be interpreted as imagined and then possibly the protagonist kills the kid just because she thinks him becoming unruly at school was because he was being possessed (when it was clear it was because his parents died). But this has the kid's perspective, saying she always has been this evil mastermind and did everything to piss off the mother. Of the fact she described her father's ass as esculpted, that made me feel sick.
also why the fuck did the author keep having the mom admire the daughter at the weirdest time, "her collage was pretty good and she has an excellent French accent"
These are truly some of the most incompetent characters I've ever had the pleasure of hearing someone rant about. Like...stop having kids. Stop while you're ahead.
Maybe demon babies are part of evolution. I mean nobody gets a manual when they become a parent, but if you manage to get murdered by something you squirted together maybe y’all shouldn’t be reproducing 🫤
I don't know why but I feel like the author definitely injects her own issues to this book she writes. She hated her mom, she had a stupid Swedish ex, so she decided to go hell with it, I'll write my own experience as a story and then proceeds to write herself as a creepy 7 year old child because she needs something original and "mind-blowing". This book sounds like it's written in one sitting on a hatred fueled rage lmaoo 😂
I separate authors from their characters esp if it's horror so I shall assume she doesn't have issues other than poor writing Lol. I also think she might be swedish and that's why she wrote it so much in the book? But like... Why
Would take more than a French accent to convince me she was some dead French woman. How about 'Lol ok then ~Marie-Anne. Talk to me in old French then. Whole sentences. Go on. Cant? Thats too bad. Identity theft is not a joke Hanna. You're grounded.'
So this book is about a mom and daughter are competing for the dad/husband affection... Is this book trying to prove Freud's theory or something like wtf lmao
I'm honestly so sick of this horror trope of "autistic-coded child is a menace to everyone on purpose" especially as an autistic person who knows just how pervasive these ideas are in real life. So sorry you had to read this trash lol
all throughout this video, i was thinking "no kid acts like this unless there's Some kind of traumatic event in their life." which, when we got to the baby's villain origin story, i felt weirdly vindicated. like. a three-year-old isn't going to have the capacity to understand or process something like what the mother in the book does. it's entirely possible that that by itself *would* be enough to traumatize her! so basically book demonizing a likely-traumatized child, while also being really weird and s3xual and creepy about it? Fucking Yikes? it really reads, to me, the author saying "well, this child's doing THIS, do u still think she's innocent? doesn't she deserve to be treated like shit??" which like. if you have to write an Entire Novel demonizing traumatized children, maybe consider that you're the one with the problem here.
I want to give the benefit of the doubt and say that the child is only being demonized from the mom's perspective, but the kid's perspective is written so poorly as well lol
I kept thinking how I would try to interpret her behavior in a compassionate or neutral way and encourage her. Like, ok, you pooped on the floor after I left. Maybe you were scared or stressed and didn't know how to ask this strange caregiver for help? You talked to me but won't talk to dad or admit to talking? Maybe we're putting too much pressure on you in the moment or you were confused about the question, or struggling to process it. You write mean things on a paper? Maybe something happened I'm not aware of that upset you and you're expressing your frustration towards me because I'm a safe target. Regardless, I'm so proud of you for knowing all those words! And for figuring out I'm a fallible human at only 7. I was at least 11 before I realized my mom was an idiot! Do you want to draw a picture to get your feelings out? Etc. Turning everything into "you hate me and want to hurt me" is such a self-centered and unaccomodating way think.
Sometimes i cant help but think how do some books get published fr dont they go through several people before hitting the stores? And none of those people tried to stop this author? Oh lord 💀💀💀
It's official. We've seen it with Sarah J. Maas, and now here. The dreaded ellipsis. If your characters can't end a single sentence, it's a red flag in the literary world.
I work with kids pretty often because I'm a counselor at a science camp, and I gotta say that I can't take any of this seriously because none of this is stuff that kids would think. Even if they were genius psychopaths like this child, they don't have nuanced inner monologues. They use their emotions to make decisions, that’s why it's so important to teach them consequences. And any adult with half a brain would see so clearly that she has severe issues, and wouldn't engage in this weird psychological warfare with a seven-year-old.
Thank you for your service Cindy, what a harrowing experience 😂😭 I can’t stand when children are written this way; giving them the (conveniently selective) cognition of an adult, then the next minute they’re saying “goo goo gah gah” or “yummy yum yum”. Having a 7 yr old reminisce about the metaphors her 3 yr old self thought of 💀 how am I supposed to take any of that seriously? Doesn’t understand what her parents are doing during their “special language time”, then suddenly knows it’s called sex. Also, not the internalized misogyny of describing her mother like a used, worthless object until her dad makes her “come alive” by having sex with her?! Where the f*** did this homeschooled 7 yr old learn that?? Oh, and Fika, the sacred Swedish coffee break, is not just something for the workplace- it’s done everywhere! At home, with family, friends, or by yourself 😄
Hold on, hold on! This kid is four years old and: 1)she knows how to write and read 2)her spelling is pretty advanced 3)she knows how to search up something on Google 4)despite her age, she can manipulate people and mess up with them and she is well-aware of it AND WHY ARE MEN SO STUPID IN THESE TYPE OF BOOKS!? Like, can't the husband knowledge that there's something wrong with his daughter? And please, the fact that he was like "If I didn't see it happen, then it didn't happen" I wanted to laugh. It's oka to not believe everything you hear, but come on, how can he mitrust his own wife so much?!
Despite the fact that this book has some quite disturbing themes, listening to you rant about it made my evening better. So really thank you. Honestly, one of my thoughts while watching were regarding the mum: "why is she dumping her existential crisis on her 3 yo? Does she not have any friends?" And I think that the mother would need therapy just as much as her kid. Also the dad is extremely stupid but I'd argue that the mum is stupid too. She only relies on a man that consistently shows that he won't help her or back her up - no friends, no other help (until the middle of the book). I am convinced the kid is smart enough to learn French and Google stuff (she probably found sex on Google too) to overcompensate for the single braincell that the parents share, lol. Absolutely looking forward to part 2. The book doesn't sound like something I would read but I love your thoughts. ❤️
Hold on, I'm only part way through the video but if you think your spouse is hallucinating disturbing things involving your kid, why would you ever have them be the stay at home parent?
The fact that the kid wasn't really possessed and the book keep making it clear that she's NOT possessed, makes it more disturbing. I think the way the kid was written was especially weird when it was the mom's perspective at the devil banging part. I'm so sorry you had to go through this Cindy 😩
I've said this before but a lot of horror stories set in the modern times just don't work with how they could easily prove the "supernatural" happenings with their phones. So now that it's possible, the characters have to be so dumb so the plot could keep going and that's just bad writing
They could also find inspiration from Eastern/Southeastern Asian horror that uses techonology as the danger/vector like Ringu (older) and Incantation (modern) Like… they could do so much but they dont???
The second I was going to finally start reading a library book that’s due tomorrow, the SECOND I was about to put away my phone I get the notification for this one. But I cant complain because I’m a simple Swede, I see my favorite UA-camr has posted a rant review I have been waiting for AND it has the Swedish flag in the thumbnail and all of our past kings possesses my spirit to click it. Don’t have a single regret EDIT: the more I watch the more I think the author has never talked to a Swedish person in her life. Actually, I’m not sure she knows what Sweden is.
@@withcindy The Lesbianas Guide To Catholic School by Sonora Reyes! I’ve read like the first chapter and I really really liked it and the chapter titles are so funny so I might just stay up the whole night to read as much as I can even if I might not be able to finish it after watching this video
Why do “evil child” stories all have so much underlying vilification of autism, plus other forms of ableism? Just one example, the child doesn’t speak despite obvious lack of physical explanations, and communicates via other means, and the instead of selective mutism the novel jumps to “this is out of spite for sure, cause she CAN speak but just Chooses not to.” Like, idk. In a world where autistic children have been literally accused of being possessed and then are forced through traumatizing exorcisms and medical torture to “fix it” just seems sus to give vilified autistic traits to the trope of the “evil child.”
How on earth are the parents finding time to have sex despite arguing over their freakish child? I would assume there would be too much tension between them since they disagree on if the kid is actually evil and what to do about it.
Every single character in this book expect the babysitter and the apparently gay Latino teacher is an insufferable and horrible human being. But the dad... The dad.. I have never been more infuriated with a fictional man. I could never share a house with that idiotic man-child. I would have been out the door the first time he gaslighted me about his demon spawn.
I know we all are ripping this husband to shreds but my parents did exactly the same to my small sister doing similiar shit so this book has to have a trigger for traumatised older siblings too
thats literally what i was thinking, specifically my little brother has done so many horrible things, like trying to steal very expensive machines when im the only other person there so obviously, i would get in trouble with the police. also breaking into houses, etc and hes only 10. i could go on and on about how he ruins my life, in fact just last night he did something bad
as soon as i heard “it’s been a while since i’ve ranted” i packed the fattest bowl . love hearing your rants!! people might say “oo i hate negativity” but those people SUCK. ranting and hating is fun
It's genuinely so fun to rant and hate one something. Like sure there's probably a point where it's unhealthy, but anyone who completely hates negative rant humor have never been in retail/fast food, talking shit about customers
Not trying to defend the legitimately bizarre choices made for this book, but my parents - for all their faults - taught me the "proper" names of "parts" long before I was ready for the concept of sex. My mother didn't like to sugar coat things, and thought it would help to protect me from SA at a young age if I knew what everything was actually called.
Yeah, I was taught the real names of body parts too. My parents really hated the “baby talk” terms (doodle, weiner, etc) so I learned those from other kids and school later.
I was looking for this comment! My mom was very frank about the words used for genitalia but we did have other words for things so my sensitive-skinned self didn't yell "mommy my vagina itches" in the middle of the store. I could instead say "my bits itch" and she knew what I meant and she also knew that if something was truly wrong (not just standard laundry detergent itchies) that I knew the correct name for my parts and was comfortable communicating it with her.
Everyone: The kid is a monster. Husband: Not my little angel! Once they'd had difficulty finding a school, the argument that he 'never saw any of the issues' is impossible to believe. The mom would leave, unable to cope with a child that seems to outright hate her and a husband who gaslit her. I don't buy this story. "Why do you want a naked picture of your mom?" Shrug! "Well, okay, sweety." WTF?!
15:09 I swear the author probably is one of those narc moms with autistic kids. This reminds me of my brother and his speech therapist, Jamie. My mom was concerned at first because he kept scripting the bad parts of movies, like when a character felt rejected or was having an outburst, and his therapist was actually really excited about that!! Rorey wasn't very good with words or expressing himself until then, and so scripting really helped him figure out what he wanted to express. Rorey's gone a long way with his expressions now and hes even graduated speech therapy :D Honestly I love it- when in books or real life- an adult meets a nuerodivergent kid's energy and treats them like how you would any kid :> Just makes me hate the mom in the story more tho lol
As a Speech Pathologist there is so many things wrong with this 🤦♀️. This girl may have selective mutism and this should be helped by a speechie by offering AAC and a mental health professional to assist with the underlying reason that the mutism is occurring.....
Me presenting audio evidence at Simlish court to accuse the defendant: 9:46
LOLLLL
Simlish x minion-ese
This killed me😭
Dont even do simlish dirty like that xD
It also sounds a little bit like Crazy Frog
The straight woman's horror: mothering not only her child, but also her husband 😭
The ableist woman's horror: mothering an autistic child 🤡
@@doodledogdiary3644 Do all autistic children have fake french accents?
Lmao
That describes my mom, even though she doesn't have to mother me that much anymore
the underlying horror of the story is the daughter and mom striving for daddy’s approval for SOME reason despite his inadequacies as a husband and father
i think thats the whole theme of this story. fighting over a useless man. LOL
God that man was so annoying
need this guy to get another child acting like a demon to only him and his wife doesn't believe him
@@bbew2914 YES 😂 I need that now
Ngl thats my family in a nutshell- (but im a guy)
“It might be worse that your kid is gonna be a furry. She might end up being French.” Isn’t that just the plot of Beauty and the Beast?
Tale/Tail as old as time...
pls i cant cindy
LMAOOOO
Is this why belle's mom is no longer around!!! Is this a prequel! LOL JK
Fjdjdjdbdjs why would you-
I’m sick of the baby horror where all the torture is on the mother. Where’s the horror where the father is tormented and abused? Women have been gaslighted both in and out of fiction a million times in horror at this point it’s lazy.
the bad seed has the dad with a demon child. Also little evil I think.
I recently read a murder mystery where the mother killed MC’s sister as a child and plays the victim after every little thing happens to her.
@@BooksRebound yes that's the movie meant 💀 I only put that film in the brackets in case they didn't recognise the name ari aster my bad
@@BooksRebound
I just watched this a few days ago and I'd never heard about it before, strange that I've seen it come up multiple times since. But yes, it's a greatly unsettling short about a dynamic that is pretty much never explored.
How about the movie Joshua? Granted it's only one of the few, but in the end the dad (played by Sam Rockwell) got all the blame for his mom and wife's demise (when in truth its his son, Joshua, who orchestrated their tragedy) , and he's like the only one who knows that Joshua is a conniving little shit and no one believes him. IDK. It's the only movie I can think of where the dad gets tortured and gaslighted by a monster child.
A sex scene from a child's PoV is a very strange writing decision
We gotta be edgy
In Nutshell by Ian McEwan (had to read it for school 🤮) there is a sex scene told from the perspective of an unborn fetus…and yes, it’s as awful as it sounds
i was watching this video with growing concern what the actual fuck is wrong with the author AND the people allowing this book to exist
the sex + racist undertones (swedish = perfect versus the gay latino comment) + blatant ableism THIS IS DERANGED
@@nicky7738 ex-fucking-scuse me?
@@nicky7738 from a WHAT
Y'know what would have been a great twist? If the dad had been playing dumb all along and he knew what was going on but he enjoyed tormenting his wife with their daughter
Yeah instead he's just an idiot
I half expected a revelation that the dad had been experimenting on Hanna, making her so fucked up like with Pietre in Utopia
It's that not what happens? By the end of Cindy's video, I am thinking it's going to be revealed he was the truly evil one all along and that's where the daughter got it from, because surely no one can be that stupid.
Literally I was waiting for that to be the twist and when it never came o was so let down it at least would have been interesting
Oof
As a Swed I just wanted to let you all know that for all the stereotypical weird Swedish things the author decided to put in this book, she got one thing right. Swedish men ARE this annoying. And dismissive. Ill give them credit for that
HAHAH
FRRRR I dated a guy like him and the mf was as "patriotic" as AMERICANS
😂 I’m not surprised
De är ju det på riktigt lol
Say hay who huh what now? 😀
As someone who works with kids, there is a correct way to respond to this behavior even when the children involved are NOT possessed by a french witch. Like a reasonable adult should still NEVER let a kid print out naked pictures and have free reign of the internet??? Protect your kids and your privacy people?? Some children have behavioral issues, don’t know any better, or have been exposed to fucked up shit by other adults. Even if the husband thought his child was an angel, as a parent, he should be concerned about her??? Where is the logic?
They r truly the dumbest parents
The Logic really isn't strong with these parents.
Lmao thank you 🙏
These stories that have the daughter being all nice to the dad but torturing the mom always have these weird misogynistic undertones. Hell, even overtones.
The entire tone
@@PichuElric a symphony even
True
@@xenrusxenomorph2268cacaphony more like
Every even harmonic, misogyny built like an analog saturation
"The child mimics having sex with The Devil"
didn't have that on 2022 bingo now I need Jesus
Yeah......
That sounds like the plot of a sequel to the VVitch
As someone who was convinced to read Baby Teeth by someone who described it as “a masterpiece”, this video is sweet vindication
It is time for us haters to SPEAK UP
That someone betrayed you
Whoever said that chose violence.
I realize I probably shouldn't judge without reading it for myself but I was genuinely surprised that this is a critically acclaimed book because it sounds genuinely awful.
I was in my Junior year when my English teacher recommended it to me (because I like horror) 🙃
As an ethnic kid, if I was in this story - it would be like "Hannah wrote bitch, and then her mommy annihilated her".
If my mother ever heard me say those words I'll get the taste of the flying slipper and the rolling pin
lmfao yeah. like my parents didn’t hit me or my brother but if i did even 1% of hannah did it would’ve been over for me.
I didn’t even swear but I was heavily talking back to my mom…. I got my mouth washed out with soap 😎
My family isn't ethnic but my Ma would have beaten me so badly I wouldn't have been able to breathe for at least 2 weeks.
@@emmacasey646I'm pretty sure the only parents that dont do this to are middle class/rich people.
This feels like this was written by the mother of a disabled child who resents her child's existence cause shes not the perfect daughter she wanted
yeah :(
I don't think it's about being perfect the child is literally a psychopath
@hachi7100 yes and? the point stands, the author chose to write her that way. it's all too familiar to disabled people (myself included) to be framed as though we are intentionally being difficult, which this fictional child IS, but that’s not realistic, and thus comes off as this "disabled kids are evil" mentality? (i'm sorry if i explained poorly)
@@so_far_away im sorry this is a horror book? What are you expecting a world of rainbows and roses where nothing bad ever happens. What would've been your ideal ending the mom letting herself get killed by that demon child because "oh no it's abelist to defend yourself" I'm so confused on why you read a book with this premise? Or do you excuse all murderers and psychopaths because you think they have a disability?
nobody was saying 'it's ableist to defend yourself'.. don't put words into their mouth. It's really distasteful. @@hachi7100
So. This is a book about a neurodivergent 7-year-old, except she's not actually neurodivergent she's just faking it to be cruel, abusing her mother despite being, again, a 7-year-old, because her mother did something genuinely frightening to her and she was traumatized, and also meanwhile there's a school for special needs kids that describes the disabled kids in extremely condescending and offensive ways. Cool cool cool, cool mix of things to have in your book. I REALLY hope this author doesn't have children
I was gonna say, this sounds like some twisted and exaggerated wish fulfillment fantasy for a mom who hates her autistic kid
This actually sounds like she has misconduct disorder but she's too young to have that 😶🌫️
@@zvikomboreromukamba3389 she can have that, but she cant be diagnosed with it
Yeah seriously, like I don't plan on ever having kids but I hate that this kid is villainized so heavily when her mom is verbally abusing her kid and her dad is the sack of shit he is
@@zvikomboreromukamba3389 why too young? Both ICD11 and DSM-5 list childhood onset of conduct disorder as the behavior starting before the age of 10. She also has been showing the behavior for years, so the ≥12 months criteria is fulfilled.
"that diarrhea... We gonna get into that later. Just you wait" the dread this sentence filled me with omg
LOLLLLLL
Yep, was about to go to sleep until that, whereupon I said “oh …really?”
Oh god… I I just…I’m forty minutes in and haven’t yet reached the warned parts of diarrhoea and devil sex
literally sustained psychic and emotional damage from this line
@@erina2600 Me too. I'm scared.
Ugh the husband character is my worst nightmare. That's the true horror in this book
He is truly the worst
At least he's not French
Alternate reading where the husband is a the real villain, the kid is neurodivergent and trying in a maladaptive way to please the more volatile parent while communicating something is very, very wrong, and the mom is just gaslit into a stupor.
The more I watch this the more I'm convinced the author doesn't have a kid and really hates children.
The entire book is a good argument for birth control (to be fair tho we can't assume what the author actually believes since fiction is different)
@@withcindy the pro life supporters are shaking in they're boots
She definitely hates children lol she’s always arguing about teens online on twitter😂
Yes! A lot of what Hannah is doing is pretty advanced for a 4-7 year old. There are some things I've seen kids like this do, the barking, oppositional behavior, manipulation, etc. But the French, pretending she was possessed, the weird dead people collage, that way too farfetched
Or really hates autistic children.
“For the PTSD” he interrupts
“I hate that you get like this.”
Divorce him. Yesterday.
her saying "he's swedish" gave the same energy as "i grew up in utah" from the wives
I don't get why y'all are making fun of that line when the narrator immediately acknowledged how stupid it was to say that, it was clearly intended that the mother was rambling things that didn't make sense out of shock, can't y'all read?
it's giving "I'm latina" in lele pons book
@@flowflower2816 Considering the fact that he is such an absolutely nothing of a character who seems to only exist to be fought over for no reason by his wife and literal baby, we are justified in roasting the statement. Seriously, tell me anything substantial about this man's personality that doesn't involve being dismissively absent or blatantly Swedish.
I just came from that video...
@@ButterflyScarletblatantly Swedish? I’m sorry that’s not that funny but it made me laugh
“You’re a best selling author and I’m just a random person on the internet.”
Cindy you’ve just described J.K. Rowling’s worst nightmare 💀
Lol oh yeah i think thats what her new book is based on
@@withcindy
69 likes! Nice
@@withcindy I’m severely out of the loop with her other than her being awful. I couldn’t finish Harry Potter cause I really dislike her writing.
So uh… what’s up with her now?
@@Frostfern94 her writing somehow got worse
@@Frostfern94 Yes.
For me, my rage quit was when the mom was mentally complaining that because of her Crohn’s, she had to eat a salad while they had grilled chicken. Even an inch of research would have informed this author that those of us without colons, or shortened guts, tend to not be ABLE to eat salad because it doesn’t digest and causes obstruction. Grilled chicken is one of my safe food. (I have Crohn’s, too, so the depiction made me really upset).
Right like literally one of the BASIC things you’d know if you researched it is that insoluble fiber can be enemy territory 😂
This author handles Swedish culture like a tourist is literally so funny.
I think the author might be swedish ???
@@withcindy She's American as far as I can tell looking her up
@@withcindy No, she is an American, a person form sweden would know that the important thing for our culture is never sitting beside a stranger on the train. Standing in line. Fika is of course very important, so that is true. I don´t think a person that actually did know anything about being swedish would take Abba as a band that was so important. I mean We have Robyn as an artist, witch would be a better name for a babysitter. But even if Robyn is famous in lots of countrys, she is not as famous for being swedish as Abba is.
@@withcindy Definitely not. The first clue was naming a character Abba (which is an acronym and not a real name). It's like naming a character IKEA.
@@emblachan Why don't Swedes sit behind strangers on trains?
overlooked detail is the fact that it frames being nonverbal (a trait often found in autistic kids) as something that children just choose to be for the sake of being difficult for their parents. i'm an autistic person who experiences occasional speech loss, meaning certain situations will prevent me from verbal communication. nonverbal autistics, meanwhile, are not capable of verbal communication, ever. this is something that's not even fully understood in the autistic community, hence the amount of people who describe speech loss as "going nonverbal" because they assume it's a thing that comes and goes and not a constant trait.
honestly, i could make a lot of points about how hanna reads as a demonized stereotype of autistic kids, but instead i'll say it would've been much more interesting if the book was explicitly about a horrible ableist mother losing her mind over normal autistic behavior instead of all that just being subtext.
Willful withholding of speech is real though. If a child knows their parent(s) want them to speak, sometimes they just won’t.
ButI agree with your point 100%. Framing this child as autistic/special needs when they are just malicious is horrible representation.
Honestly this book feels like it was ghostwritten by my mom?? From the "my kid took away my freedom" to the "my kid fucks things up on purpose to test my patience" to the "my autistic kid doesn't communicate on purpose to spite me" and the "feeding and clothing my child but never showing any affection, wondering what went wrong when they start to resent me, then ultimately concluding that it's totally their fault and blaming them for everything" it's disturbingly too close for comfort and I am certain that if I ever met the author in real life I'd probably feel compelled to beat her up
The whole nonverbal thing was super fked. Like, a LOT of people have mutism or selective mutism and it’s NOT a choice to be an ass. There’s being silent to fk with people in the middle of an argument, and then there’s literally having a mental disorder that makes it hard and/or terrifying to verbally communicate.
Seeing this comment made it click for me why every second of hearing about this book made me so uncomfortable lol
yep, im selectively mute, always got in trouble for being stubborn or shutting down. it wasn't too bad since i could/can force some speech if im scared (and it's for this reason that im still scared of adults at age 18), but regardless if id known i was autistic growing up, i doubt id have hated myself less, because id still have been regarded as "difficult" just for being anxious.
"maybe the real horror isn't having a demon child, but an incompetent gaslighting husband" REAL
Cindy really said: “I will CARVE OUT AN HOUR discussing Demon Spawn and harmful portrayals of Swedish Adults.”
And there's still so much more
And i attentiously watched every single second of it 😭😭😭
@@withcindy
My x. M ml
This to me this sounds like if someone who don´t like children wrote a horror story but her best idea was: "child with special needs fakes it for attention", but then made the child have the mind of an adult and hate the mother to justify some random abuse...the mother on this book sounds like a woman who would acuse her daughter of wanting to steall her man.
also wtf with the husband lol
I read the book (well, half of it, I gave up finally) and a lot of Hannah's behaviours mimick the mentally disabled/autistic kids my mum deals with in special needs school she works in. I really hated the book, because it felt a lot like what you described.
lowkey Detective Conan meets demon child…
Ikr? This bugged the heck out of me because it sounds like a book written by an Autism Mommy Martyr who makes no effort to understand or accommodate their child, and then assumes the child's combative behavior and meltdowns are the child deliberately, maliciously punishing them. Rather than it being their nervous system overloading from the constant stress of being pathologized, blamed and punitively corrected for normal ND behavior.
Things like, "Well, you can write so you must be able to talk but are refusing just to drive me crazy," is such a "me, me, me, everything is about me" way of interpreting a ND child's actions. And everything Hannah does is presented that way, with her internal monologue "proving" this awful, narcissistic way of looking at autistic children's struggles correct. It makes me wish I had a copy of this book so I could huck it at the wall.
@@alexhalstead8824Nah pissing on the book is the way to go. Or dropping it in toilet water.
Baby Teeth being the weirdest book you've read when you've read Kissing the Coronavirus is not what I expected in 2022.
Nah this takes the cake
With that one you at least get what you expected
At least with Kissing The Coronavirus it has a weird title so you kinda know what to expect
I'm sorry but "Alex would never! He's a mature, kind, sophisticated man... he's Swedish!" HAHAHA I lost it
I lost my brain cells
Sarah J Mass wishes she could make her characters growl, bite and hiss this much
Naurrrr 😭
Pfffffft
I just don't understand how Suzette didn't divorce her husband, he is one of the most frustrating book characters I've had the displeasure of knowing about
Personally, I’m just curious about where all these clueless dunderf*cks keep coming from and why women in these sorts of stories keep marrying them. Look, I get that love can be quiet blind at times, but there are some faults that (unless you’re really trying) you just can’t ignore.
...cos bitch, dick too bomb?
Would have just packed my bags and left. Let him bond with his little angel🙄
Same. I do not have the energy for this in my life.
literallyyyyy, if they love each other so much they can damn well have each other@@sugasweet435
The whole book just makes me feel like the author hates disabled people, wants to hurt children or is a pdf file, and has a pick-me complex wanting to impress men.
absolutely this. the book is horrifying because of the implications that loom over the author and the people involved in letting this be made wtf
exactly my thought. This jsut screams hidden pedophila to me... Any story can do perfectly fine without it and still dish out a lot of shock value. The person who wrote it, the person who edited it, and the person who agreed to publish it have a problem, imo
why would the dad let her print a naked picture of her mum?!? that dad is just terrible
the dad is literally so dumb i can't
Y E A H. seriously he just??? Just let's it be????
Better question is why did he even let it get to that point, why wasn't he VERY concerned by his kid having a pic of his wife naked AND sleeping.
@@dustrose8101 better yet why didn't they LOCK the door?
@@flowflower2816 They fucking should have way before this point but tbh I'd be concerned the kid would barricade them or just the mom in the room and then set the house on fire...
My thoughts:
• initially, the mum shows incredible patience and does her best to parent The Gremlin, props to her
• she's riddled with internal ableism though
• the horror element of the story is having a husband who believes a 7 year old gremlin over his wife
• children are uncannily smart but also dumb but surely no 7 year old has that level of malice and intelligence
• this is a weird book
An entire book about a kid trolling her mom is a low key hilarious concept
True sounds like a cheesy romcom than horror
To be honest, I think that they just forgot to add the last plot twist to the book which was that the husband was a master gaslighter/manipulator all along.
Instead he's just an idiot
This whole thing feels like it was written by my toxic mother to prove that children are inherently evil
I wouldn't be surprised if it was
Lmao
Hahaha yep
THAT'S WHAT I WAS THINKING, I cringed reading this book, like miss girly probably the type of person to get jealous of their kid...
The part where the kindergarten teachers tell the dad what Hannah's been doing and doesn't believe them??? omg it's so accurate. There was a little girl in my after school preschool group who was like this: dad thought she could do no wrong, didn't believe the several adults who told him about what she was doing. And just pulled her out of the program.
It's so annoying!!
Narcissistic parents and their spoiled brats 💀
I think the worst part about the dad character is how realistic he really is
Holy crap, the Mum needs to go " okay, I'm leaving you alone with our daughter for a month and we'll see how she acts for you." And then never come back home.
To be fair, ignoring a problem and pretending like it doesn't exist is very Swedish
i--
@@withcindyI think you meant "I..." dot dot dot
@@withcindyit’s true, I didn’t know how aware the internet was of this but it’s true
The scenes of the demon baby acting sexual made me wanna drown myself in Holy Water 😀
same
9:37 cindy staring straight into my soul while the audiobook obnoxiously goes *BE BE BE GWAH GUA* is my new aesthetic and no i won't be explaining any further
Am I the only person who doesn't find possessed kids scary😭 like what is this child gonna do to me💀
LOL right u could easily punt them
have you ever seen home alone?
@@gliscorpropagandaaccount1764 Lmao perfect argument, and he wasn't even possessed
Literally like just fucking kick them
possessed kids dont even feel demonic to me, they just seem like kids who weren't given morals to go by
My mom is a teacher and has taught in multiple schools designed for troubled children, and there has NEVER been a child who was THIS NASTY on that frequent of a basis. Were there the odd freakouts that demonstrated similar behavior to the child in the book? Definitely. However, she has yet to encounter a child this vindictive and spiteful. There were two kids who would "play" with me by biting my ankles and they were still better behaved than this. Damn.
what do u mean ur mom didnt have any kids who spoke fluent french while pretending to be banged by the devil???
@@withcindy None of those words are in the bible 💀
@@shakirashipslied9721 are you sure about that. are you sure the devil wasnt in the bible
@@haniakupczak2068 Yes
@@haniakupczak2068 tbf I think the bibles written in Hebrew so likely yes
this book sounds like what's going on in the head of a mom who abuses her child. Like when there are bruises on the child, she would assume that the child sneakily did that to herself to set her up and whatnot.
Honestly, if the plot twist was that her mother was emotionally abusing/neglecting her the whole time and made up all these stories about Hanna due to having ableistic tendencies towards her, it would have made the story so much better.
Not to mention how the entire “rivalry” between the mother and child was started by the mom force feeding Hannah. But the book tries to make Hannah as despicable as possible so you don’t see her as a victim of two idiot parents and don’t feel bad when the mom fights her back. It’s very transparent.
Personally, I’m all for Team Little Gremlin to keep pretending to be French and throwing carrots at her mother.
Yeah I swear she sounds like my abusive mother talking about my younger sister and brother. How they’re so ‘manipulative’ and my father was choosing them over her
Yes cuz I literally hated the mom
No cuz that plot twist would've worked so well especially when she told Hanna "now you know how it feels" or something like that.
Rant videos are fun because A) Hearing Cindy recount the insane plots of the books she reads is endlessly funny
B) Cindy’s snarky comments are always delivered flawlessly
This is prob the most insane book I've read
She's just straight up entertaining tbh
@@withcindy The Wives is the worst. Imagine finding out at the ending that half of the book did not even happen at all. 😀
i literally lost it at the whole "he's not capable of doing that.. he's swedish" part
I couldn't believe it
I literally cried laughing 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I can't believe the fact that a real person wrote that sentence, get it through an editor, printed and shipped it to become a best-selling book...
So she fetishizes Swedish men... that's why she's so unbelievably tolerant towards his bs.
petition to make every swedish person read this book
I need to watch their reactions
Imagine Cindy correcting misspelled hate comments like a test 😂
I mean it was a spelling test!
I hated when they toured the art school and the mom judged all of the artwork in the school which was made by literal children... When she re iterates through the whole book that her own kid doesn't/won't draw a single thing ever. The consistent elitism and ableism of the parents was so strange and went pretty much unaddressed and wasn't really thematically relevant by the end. They gave off this vibe of "my child may have behavioral issues but at least she's not learning disabled (or, as the father himself said, r*tarded)." While the parents have a lot of regrets it doesn't feel like they ever have to actually reconcile with the way their perfectionism, egos, and elitism have prevented them from properly raising or handling their daughter. It's ambiguous but they kind of get a happy ending anyway where they get to "go back to the way they were before Hanna" so it doesn't feel like they learned anything or had to confront anything about their mindsets at all. Mostly the mom just gets to be vindicated.
Also if Hanna genuinely does suffer from psychopathy/delusions/etc. then I really question the choice to villainize her within the story and also make comparisons to the kid from "The Omen" in the marketing. It's so stigmatizing and parts of the book even acknowledge that psychopathy is a genuine mental illness but they don't treat it with the same respect that Suzette's PTSD is treated with at all. Nowhere even close. For all the scary things Hanna did, I ended up feeling bad for her, because when it comes down to it, she is a mentally ill child and there's nothing evil about that... It's complicated and sad and difficult to handle but it is not evil. Just wished that either the author had gone with an actual possession storyline or treated Hanna's condition with more respect.
I say all this but mostly I was just kind of bored by the book lol
So many good points here!!
Why is this kid so unnecessarily evil??? There's no way a child can have that much of a flat desire to make someone's life hell on purpose
like sure there’s the weird origin story where Hanna wants to “test” her mom to see if she’s a good one or smth like that but even that aint kept straight 💀 it goes from that (which was honestly a cooler motive. but my bar is very low for this book so thats not saying much) to wanting Alex’s attention. They’re doing all this over a Swedish man
The way you read the “f*uck mommy she is weak am stupid” had me cracking up 😂
DEMON VOICE
You know this shit is serious when Cindy splits the rant into two parts
For real I had too much to say
This shit is even more serious than the A Court of Thorns and Roses series 😂
This book is...so disgusting? I'm so sorry you had to read that, i probably wouldn't have made it past the first chapter. EVERYONE CLAP FOR CINDY
I have not read the book and do not know the author, so I don't want to imply anything about them, but I can't help but notice how similar a lot of the writing sounds to Those Kind of Parents with neurodiverse children. Like, the selective mutism, the growling/barking, the humming/singsonging during studying, even the difference in behavior in other environments and biting other kids (overloads anyone?), all can be signs of being neurodiverse and specifically autistic. I doubt it's intentional but it very much reads like a mommy blogger talking about how her child is only showing symptoms to make her life hell (and the father ignoring all of it also matches that).
Omg nooooo 😭
Yeah literally the "she can speak but chooses not to" I immediately thought about selective mutism and how this is just an ablist way to describe something that's not a "choice"
The author really said “what if autism is scary?”
💀😭
“Can you spell fucking idiot?” 😂I wish I read this book with the narration to traumatize myself more. This book will never leave my psyche for all the wrong reasons
The audiobook definitely sets it to a whole new level
My son has extreme speech delay and one day he went to my parents' house and just stared at a wall terrified and then said Ghost. That was literally like his sixth word. My parents moved. This is a really ableist book though. I actually find the character of the Dad way more realistic than the mum.
That's what I thought while reading the book, there're kids with issues similar to Hannah's (minus being manipulative pos) and it's not cool to use it as a set up for a horror imo.
Maybe it's just the PTSD-talking, but this is reading less like "demon spawn child" and more "demonizing an autistic/neurodivergent children vicariously through an 'evil' child" vibes. Is that just me? Am I the weird one?? The things they say just rings too close to how people talk about autistic/neurodivergent children. IDK, but listening to someone riff on a ridiculous book is still fun anyway, lol
ps:
omelette du fromage
There was actually a line where the mom mentions being "afraid their child was autistic" 💀 but I think they had done tests and figured she wasn't
You're not weird, I also read it that way. It was so uncomfortable that I didn't finish the book.
Yeah this story has my "moms who murder their kid for being disabled" senses tingling but I really hope that's not where this is going.
@@thecatlurking If the book was actually well written that would have been a good twist, similarly like the turning of the screw, where the ghosts can be interpreted as imagined and then possibly the protagonist kills the kid just because she thinks him becoming unruly at school was because he was being possessed (when it was clear it was because his parents died).
But this has the kid's perspective, saying she always has been this evil mastermind and did everything to piss off the mother. Of the fact she described her father's ass as esculpted, that made me feel sick.
r u sure nds print out dead people with their naked mother
its the way that the moment that my husband starts believing my crazy ass kid over me I'm leaving both of them. they deserve each other at that point.
also why the fuck did the author keep having the mom admire the daughter at the weirdest time, "her collage was pretty good and she has an excellent French accent"
I've never felt such a strong urge to pull a WWE move on a fictional baby until the author decided to create this hellspawn.
LOL
The fact that you said fictional tells me that irl kids are free real estate
This can’t be a real book. 😭 I refuse to believe it. Who read this and was like “yes, the world needs to read this!” 💀
there rly is a book for everyone i guess
It's the fact that everyone is acting like this is God's gift to horror too, it's NOT GOOD in the barest sense
@@destrious8133 It's not even horror, it's just a dumpster fire.
These are truly some of the most incompetent characters I've ever had the pleasure of hearing someone rant about. Like...stop having kids. Stop while you're ahead.
Some ppl should not have children
Maybe demon babies are part of evolution. I mean nobody gets a manual when they become a parent, but if you manage to get murdered by something you squirted together maybe y’all shouldn’t be reproducing 🫤
@@withcindy Every child deserves parents but not every parent deserves a child
Banging the Devil? Sounds like Netflix adaptation material to me 💀
Lucifer?!?!
Lol Lucifer?
I don't know why but I feel like the author definitely injects her own issues to this book she writes. She hated her mom, she had a stupid Swedish ex, so she decided to go hell with it, I'll write my own experience as a story and then proceeds to write herself as a creepy 7 year old child because she needs something original and "mind-blowing". This book sounds like it's written in one sitting on a hatred fueled rage lmaoo 😂
I separate authors from their characters esp if it's horror so I shall assume she doesn't have issues other than poor writing Lol. I also think she might be swedish and that's why she wrote it so much in the book? But like... Why
Would take more than a French accent to convince me she was some dead French woman. How about 'Lol ok then ~Marie-Anne. Talk to me in old French then. Whole sentences. Go on. Cant? Thats too bad. Identity theft is not a joke Hanna. You're grounded.'
so, this is book basically is, "what if the things autism speaks says about autism were real"
STOPPPPPPP 😭
@@withcindy *I DON'T SLEEP, SO I'LL MAKE SURE YOU'LL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN*
So this book is about a mom and daughter are competing for the dad/husband affection... Is this book trying to prove Freud's theory or something like wtf lmao
That dude is so obsessed with his Swedish heritage that he should've just stayed in sweden and made babies w Ikea meatballs
He's got so much patriotic pride lolol
Nah. He was banished for being too stupid.
I think Cindy felt personally attacked by the fact that the mum thought the dad might be turned off if she had a asymmetrical cut👀😂
I'm honestly so sick of this horror trope of "autistic-coded child is a menace to everyone on purpose" especially as an autistic person who knows just how pervasive these ideas are in real life. So sorry you had to read this trash lol
all throughout this video, i was thinking "no kid acts like this unless there's Some kind of traumatic event in their life." which, when we got to the baby's villain origin story, i felt weirdly vindicated. like. a three-year-old isn't going to have the capacity to understand or process something like what the mother in the book does. it's entirely possible that that by itself *would* be enough to traumatize her!
so basically book demonizing a likely-traumatized child, while also being really weird and s3xual and creepy about it? Fucking Yikes? it really reads, to me, the author saying "well, this child's doing THIS, do u still think she's innocent? doesn't she deserve to be treated like shit??" which like. if you have to write an Entire Novel demonizing traumatized children, maybe consider that you're the one with the problem here.
Yeah this. I work with kids and honestly yeah the writing of the kid is unrealistic but the behavior towards the kid is still horrible
I want to give the benefit of the doubt and say that the child is only being demonized from the mom's perspective, but the kid's perspective is written so poorly as well lol
I kept thinking how I would try to interpret her behavior in a compassionate or neutral way and encourage her. Like, ok, you pooped on the floor after I left. Maybe you were scared or stressed and didn't know how to ask this strange caregiver for help? You talked to me but won't talk to dad or admit to talking? Maybe we're putting too much pressure on you in the moment or you were confused about the question, or struggling to process it. You write mean things on a paper? Maybe something happened I'm not aware of that upset you and you're expressing your frustration towards me because I'm a safe target. Regardless, I'm so proud of you for knowing all those words! And for figuring out I'm a fallible human at only 7. I was at least 11 before I realized my mom was an idiot! Do you want to draw a picture to get your feelings out? Etc. Turning everything into "you hate me and want to hurt me" is such a self-centered and unaccomodating way think.
Sometimes i cant help but think how do some books get published fr
dont they go through several people before hitting the stores? And none of those people tried to stop this author? Oh lord 💀💀💀
I mean a lot of ppl liked it so... 💀
Colleen Hoover and JK Rowling are best selling authors and still have loads of fans. That gives me hope that I could be a writer
It's official. We've seen it with Sarah J. Maas, and now here. The dreaded ellipsis. If your characters can't end a single sentence, it's a red flag in the literary world.
I hate ellipses now lol
I work with kids pretty often because I'm a counselor at a science camp, and I gotta say that I can't take any of this seriously because none of this is stuff that kids would think. Even if they were genius psychopaths like this child, they don't have nuanced inner monologues. They use their emotions to make decisions, that’s why it's so important to teach them consequences. And any adult with half a brain would see so clearly that she has severe issues, and wouldn't engage in this weird psychological warfare with a seven-year-old.
Thank you for your service Cindy, what a harrowing experience 😂😭
I can’t stand when children are written this way; giving them the (conveniently selective) cognition of an adult, then the next minute they’re saying “goo goo gah gah” or “yummy yum yum”. Having a 7 yr old reminisce about the metaphors her 3 yr old self thought of 💀 how am I supposed to take any of that seriously?
Doesn’t understand what her parents are doing during their “special language time”, then suddenly knows it’s called sex. Also, not the internalized misogyny of describing her mother like a used, worthless object until her dad makes her “come alive” by having sex with her?! Where the f*** did this homeschooled 7 yr old learn that??
Oh, and Fika, the sacred Swedish coffee break, is not just something for the workplace- it’s done everywhere! At home, with family, friends, or by yourself 😄
right? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE
Hold on, hold on!
This kid is four years old and:
1)she knows how to write and read
2)her spelling is pretty advanced
3)she knows how to search up something on Google
4)despite her age, she can manipulate people and mess up with them and she is well-aware of it
AND WHY ARE MEN SO STUPID IN THESE TYPE OF BOOKS!? Like, can't the husband knowledge that there's something wrong with his daughter? And please, the fact that he was like "If I didn't see it happen, then it didn't happen" I wanted to laugh. It's oka to not believe everything you hear, but come on, how can he mitrust his own wife so much?!
All his brain cells just went to the kid instead
She's supposed to be 7 not 4
@@annawinkel4269 still creepy 😂
@@Halfling4 for sure but that's the point :D
its called an idiot plot
my hated trope if its not in comedy
or made sense
Tbh I really appreciate that the audiobook narrator went there with the creepy demon voice for Hanna. Much needed spice for an overall bland book
she put her narratorussy into the book
The narrator definitely deserves some good gigs!!
Despite the fact that this book has some quite disturbing themes, listening to you rant about it made my evening better. So really thank you.
Honestly, one of my thoughts while watching were regarding the mum: "why is she dumping her existential crisis on her 3 yo? Does she not have any friends?" And I think that the mother would need therapy just as much as her kid.
Also the dad is extremely stupid but I'd argue that the mum is stupid too. She only relies on a man that consistently shows that he won't help her or back her up - no friends, no other help (until the middle of the book). I am convinced the kid is smart enough to learn French and Google stuff (she probably found sex on Google too) to overcompensate for the single braincell that the parents share, lol.
Absolutely looking forward to part 2. The book doesn't sound like something I would read but I love your thoughts. ❤️
oh they all absolutely need therapy
Hold on, I'm only part way through the video but if you think your spouse is hallucinating disturbing things involving your kid, why would you ever have them be the stay at home parent?
Nevermind. Reached the part where the dad prints out the photo of his wife for his daughter. He just doesn't have a brain.
Because the dad is as dumb as rocks
The fact that the kid wasn't really possessed and the book keep making it clear that she's NOT possessed, makes it more disturbing. I think the way the kid was written was especially weird when it was the mom's perspective at the devil banging part. I'm so sorry you had to go through this Cindy 😩
as a someone who was once a freaky, sexually divergent autistic child, yeah, this is a horror novel 💀💀
"it might be worse that your kid is gonna be a furry, she might end up being French."
I laughed so hard I had to stop the video. (I'm French, sorry)
Come pick up your baby!!!
@@withcindy please, don’t make me do itttt
I've said this before but a lot of horror stories set in the modern times just don't work with how they could easily prove the "supernatural" happenings with their phones. So now that it's possible, the characters have to be so dumb so the plot could keep going and that's just bad writing
Yeah at least set it back in historical times to explain this lol
They could also find inspiration from Eastern/Southeastern Asian horror that uses techonology as the danger/vector like Ringu (older) and Incantation (modern)
Like… they could do so much but they dont???
My wife says my kids violent...nah shes on drugs..but the teachers at all the schools she gets kicked out of?? THEY'RE INSANE AND AWFUL
Who …what kind of person describes a child watching…and listening to sex. That’s just disgusting
Ok it got worse…
100% this. The whole book was giving “I’m a p3d0 but I’m gonna disguise it with ableism and the demonization of children”
Cindy, I fucking lost it when you played that audiobook narrator narrating the kid's gibberish. Pls💀💀
I couldn't believe it... But she kept going on
Can someone tell the author that not wanting to have kids, which is extremely valid, and not hating kids/children can coexist 😭😭😭
The second I was going to finally start reading a library book that’s due tomorrow, the SECOND I was about to put away my phone I get the notification for this one. But I cant complain because I’m a simple Swede, I see my favorite UA-camr has posted a rant review I have been waiting for AND it has the Swedish flag in the thumbnail and all of our past kings possesses my spirit to click it. Don’t have a single regret
EDIT: the more I watch the more I think the author has never talked to a Swedish person in her life. Actually, I’m not sure she knows what Sweden is.
Ooo what book were you going to start
@@withcindy The Lesbianas Guide To Catholic School by Sonora Reyes! I’ve read like the first chapter and I really really liked it and the chapter titles are so funny so I might just stay up the whole night to read as much as I can even if I might not be able to finish it after watching this video
@@NerdWhoSometimesReads liar, you were clearly going to read Baby Teeth lol
@@ashikjaman1940 Oh no I’m exposed!/j
@@wizmo2216 I don’t know how it is in other countries but here in Sweden you can’t renew it if it’s someone else in line for it😭
Why do “evil child” stories all have so much underlying vilification of autism, plus other forms of ableism?
Just one example, the child doesn’t speak despite obvious lack of physical explanations, and communicates via other means, and the instead of selective mutism the novel jumps to “this is out of spite for sure, cause she CAN speak but just Chooses not to.”
Like, idk. In a world where autistic children have been literally accused of being possessed and then are forced through traumatizing exorcisms and medical torture to “fix it” just seems sus to give vilified autistic traits to the trope of the “evil child.”
How on earth are the parents finding time to have sex despite arguing over their freakish child? I would assume there would be too much tension between them since they disagree on if the kid is actually evil and what to do about it.
Every single character in this book expect the babysitter and the apparently gay Latino teacher is an insufferable and horrible human being. But the dad... The dad.. I have never been more infuriated with a fictional man. I could never share a house with that idiotic man-child. I would have been out the door the first time he gaslighted me about his demon spawn.
Still unsure why Suzette (?) Made such a big deal of the gay latino?!!
I know we all are ripping this husband to shreds but my parents did exactly the same to my small sister doing similiar shit so this book has to have a trigger for traumatised older siblings too
NOOOOO I'm so sorry
thats literally what i was thinking, specifically my little brother has done so many horrible things, like trying to steal very expensive machines when im the only other person there so obviously, i would get in trouble with the police. also breaking into houses, etc and hes only 10. i could go on and on about how he ruins my life, in fact just last night he did something bad
as soon as i heard “it’s been a while since i’ve ranted” i packed the fattest bowl . love hearing your rants!! people might say “oo i hate negativity” but those people SUCK. ranting and hating is fun
Thank u for enabling hate in this world ❤️
@@withcindy 🫡 LMAO i’m a born hater supporting my fellow haters!! 👊😤
It's genuinely so fun to rant and hate one something. Like sure there's probably a point where it's unhealthy, but anyone who completely hates negative rant humor have never been in retail/fast food, talking shit about customers
A nanny cam would have solved all of Suzette's problems.
i can’t imagine being an author writing a sex scene from a 7 year old pov and thinking. yeah this is normal let’s leave it in.
Not trying to defend the legitimately bizarre choices made for this book, but my parents - for all their faults - taught me the "proper" names of "parts" long before I was ready for the concept of sex. My mother didn't like to sugar coat things, and thought it would help to protect me from SA at a young age if I knew what everything was actually called.
Yeah, I was taught the real names of body parts too. My parents really hated the “baby talk” terms (doodle, weiner, etc) so I learned those from other kids and school later.
I was looking for this comment!
My mom was very frank about the words used for genitalia but we did have other words for things so my sensitive-skinned self didn't yell "mommy my vagina itches" in the middle of the store. I could instead say "my bits itch" and she knew what I meant and she also knew that if something was truly wrong (not just standard laundry detergent itchies) that I knew the correct name for my parts and was comfortable communicating it with her.
Everyone: The kid is a monster.
Husband: Not my little angel!
Once they'd had difficulty finding a school, the argument that he 'never saw any of the issues' is impossible to believe. The mom would leave, unable to cope with a child that seems to outright hate her and a husband who gaslit her. I don't buy this story.
"Why do you want a naked picture of your mom?" Shrug! "Well, okay, sweety." WTF?!
People I ion her and she 😊😊😊😊😊
😊😊
15:09 I swear the author probably is one of those narc moms with autistic kids. This reminds me of my brother and his speech therapist, Jamie. My mom was concerned at first because he kept scripting the bad parts of movies, like when a character felt rejected or was having an outburst, and his therapist was actually really excited about that!! Rorey wasn't very good with words or expressing himself until then, and so scripting really helped him figure out what he wanted to express. Rorey's gone a long way with his expressions now and hes even graduated speech therapy :D Honestly I love it- when in books or real life- an adult meets a nuerodivergent kid's energy and treats them like how you would any kid :> Just makes me hate the mom in the story more tho lol
As a Speech Pathologist there is so many things wrong with this 🤦♀️. This girl may have selective mutism and this should be helped by a speechie by offering AAC and a mental health professional to assist with the underlying reason that the mutism is occurring.....
"And Alex never- I mean never. He is a mature, kind, sophisticated man...He's Swedish" 💀💀💀 Don't let this author google Swedish men in Thailand.