Review: Babies. You know they're creepy.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 28, 2013
What if your baby - your beautiful, bouncing five month old precious princess - started talking? Started plotting against you?Maybe even tried to kill you?That's the premise of Baby Talk... and I love it. Maybe it's just because babies always seem a little creepy to me, anyway - watching you, speaking in a language only they understand, acting in ways that are incomprehensible to most folks - and I'm never quite sure what they're up to. Maybe it's because the book leaves you wondering how much of it's really happening and how much is mere coincidence backed up with a man who has every reason in the world to be having a nervous breakdown. Either way, I was deeply disturbed with this book... and that's a good thing.The sequences involving the tennis trophy - and the added discussion of wartime uses for feces - made me cringe for all the right reasons, and Neal seems appropriately bonkers; an interesting start point and curiosity to see how Neal got there kept me reading, which earns the book high praise. The language and style are clear, concise and well-executed, and foreshadowing is used to good effect - especially the trip to the mini-mart. The secondary characters are well thought-out and executed - I've worked for more than one "Mr. Snell" in my time, and found him properly revolting and amusing - and Annie sums up every neurotic mother I've had the misfortune of meeting.Honestly, the only real down side to me is the length; it stops on a cliffhanger and hasn't yet gotten us back to where the story began. I understand the device - and it must be working, since I always end up buying Book 2s and 3s and such - but it just annoys me that the current market trends seem to be in favor of selling "incomplete" books that were arbitrarily sliced into quarters or thirds. Might just be me, though... and like I said, it's certainly good enough to warrant a second purchases. Plus, if one buys both volumes, you're paying about what a paperback costs these days, anyway.Overall, a solid and entertaining read, but over too quickly. Give it a rip if you like a dash of paranoia in your suspense, or if you're like me and find babies a trifle worrisome.