This 2018 debut novel concerns a girl, Hanna, who is exceptionally bright and also exceptionally manipulative. She refuses to speak and slowly tries to drive a wedge between her parents so that she can have her father for herself. Exceptionally deft in its depiction of child psychology, this might be a book that you’d put in the same category as The Bad Seed except that as it progresses you begin to see the mother’s legacy of damage from her own mother and how she might be passing it along, as well as the mother’s desire to have her husband all for herself. After a harrowing ride, it’s all the more remarkable that Stage puts us in a position where we can understand and even warily sympathize with the potentially psychopathic Hanna.
