You know how they say if a book doesn’t grab you on the first page or first chapter it probably won’t? No worries with this one! And I never should have started to read The Perfect Child on a workday an hour or so before my shift.
This is an extremely intense five-star read … and, admittedly, I am pretty “stingy” with five-star reads, but this one is so well deserved. There are so many things going on throughout the pages of this novel. There is six-year-old Janie who is an extremely troubled little girl who came into the hospital Christopher and Hannah worked out. Christopher being an orthopedic surgeon and Hannah being a nurse working at the same hospital. All Chris and Hannah wanted was a family of their own, enter Janie into their lives. On the outside, Janie seems to be a friendly, happy, outgoing child but behind closed doors at Chris and Hannah’s house is a different story entirely. Chris finds it hard to believe the stories that Hannah tells him about Janie’s behavior. He is blind to it he is so enamored with Janie. He’s a doctor, he can fix her. Until things go terribly, terribly wrong.
I truly believe that Ms. Berry’s profession as a trauma psychologist helped her craft this story into something that is so intense, dark, tragic, sad. This is a story of a very mixed-up little girl, you could say broken probably beyond repair, that leads to the unthinkable. It is also a story of a new mom suffering an extreme psychotic break, I suspect related to all the stress she was under at the time. There is also a hint of forgiveness between Chris and Hannah. Their story takes “for better or for worse” to a whole new level.
While this story is dark and twisted in so many ways, I think it is an important book as it brings to light conditions that happen in real life, we just don’t hear about them, darknesses that real people suffer from, darknesses that we need to be educated about. A disturbingly excellent read.
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