The Perfect Child

“She was as delicate as any newborn I’d ever held.”

When Christopher meets Janie, there is an instant connection between them, and he holds her like she is his own daughter. Christopher sees Janie as the exact person to fill the hole in his and Hannah’s lives and himself as the perfect person to take care of her. Because of Janie’s history, she is small for her size and frail due to being starved. As a result, she gives the impression of being fragile and vulnerable. This proves misleading; though certainly traumatized, Janie is herself capable of violence.

“She clung to him like he was her favorite teddy bear, and he whispered to her as they stuck her with the needle.”

Hannah can already see the bond forming between Christopher and Janie. There is a strong contrast here between the tenderness of Christopher and Janie holding onto one another and the pain of a needle prick. This foreshadows Janie’s own character: She is constantly switching between the sweet persona she presents to the outside world and the violent person she is underneath.

“We can let her stay in a cocoon a little while longer before she’s thrust into the world. We’ll give her an extra step of healing and care she wouldn’t normally get.”

Hannah willingly agrees to take Janie in, as she has always wanted to be a parent and has long since accepted that she wouldn’t be able to bear her own children. Nevertheless, her word choice implies that she believes the arrangement to be temporary, a “cocoon” from which Janie will eventually emerge. Hannah is unaware that what she sees as a few days or weeks’ worth of care is going to turn into a full adoption and much more. Moreover, the healing that Hannah hopes will occur in Janie never really does.

“Her face was contorted in rage. She ripped off her clothes, shaking in her diaper. Her fists clenched at her sides. She eyed the room, looking for something else to destroy. Hannah stepped cautiously toward her like Janie was a feral cat. She crouched down in front of her.”

Christopher awakes to Janie hitting him with her toy train and then proceeding to have a full-blown tantrum. At first, Christopher and Hannah see Janie’s behavior as a reaction to her mother’s abuse and adjustment to living with a new family; they do not realize it is a sign of something far more dangerous. Janie is compared to a feral cat because that is the way that Hannah comes to see her—as something less than human.

“I can’t ever give up because no amount of disappointment is worth giving up on what it feels like to be a mom. She gave me a taste of it, and I know I’ll never be satisfied until I get to enjoy the experience.”

Despite all of Janie’s difficulties, Hannah finds reward and meaning in taking care of her and wants more than ever to adopt or bear a child of her own. Ultimately, however, her experience of motherhood turns out to be an example of The Sinister Side of Unconditional Love and not the dreamlike fairy tale that Hannah always envisioned.

“But what about her emotional issues? We have no idea how child abuse syndrome plays out over time.”

Foreshadowing is a frequently used literary technique in the thriller genre, and Lucinda Berry employs it to hint at the plot’s outcome. Hannah is far more cognizant of the risks involved in taking Janie in than Christopher is, and she turns out to be correct.

“He shook his head, refusing to believe it. I stormed into the bedroom. I didn’t care what he thought—I was right on this one. She’d been awful to me on purpose today.”

Hannah sees a different side of Janie when Janie decides to stop talking to Hannah for several weeks. On the first day Janine exhibits this behavior, Hannah can already tell that Janie is trying to punish her, but since Christopher doesn’t see it, it creates the first of many wedges in their relationship. Hannah and Christopher’s disagreements surrounding Janie and the way that those disagreements affect their relationship provide an extreme example of How Parenting Changes a Marriage.

“It makes perfect sense that she hates her mother. But not just her mother—all mothers.”

Dr. Chandler’s narrative role is to offer clarity regarding Janie’s condition and why she acts the way she does. While Dr. Chandler is helpful to the characters in some ways, she doesn’t see the severity of the risk until it is too late. Here, she explains what can happen in reactive attachment disorder, where a child’s relationship with the primary caregiver is strained or absent, resulting in difficulty forming relationships.

“Janie turned to look at her with a murderous glare. Usually, she ignored her completely, like Hannah was an invisible woman. It was the first time in weeks I’d seen her respond to her at all. I didn’t know if it was a good sign or a bad one.”

When Christopher and Hannah begin trying to modify Janie’s behavior, it seems effective at first but ultimately only makes Janie more resentful of Hannah. Janie’s look is described as “murderous,” foreshadowing her future acts against her cat and Allison, as well as hinting at the truth about her past.

“The memories hurt. I looked down at my hands twisting on my lap. This case would haunt me in ways I would never forget.”

Piper carries the burden of guilt because she knows that even though the system is flawed, she could have done more to be there for the Bauer family. When the Bauers decided to adopt Janie, they were beyond thrilled, which becomes the story’s darkest irony; their excitement to adopt Janie would lead to several tragedies in their lives.

“I wasn’t a superstitious person, but I was obsessed with keeping things positive in regard to the baby. Somehow, it felt like keeping all the negative stuff away from the baby might be the key to keeping it.”

As soon as Hannah finds out that she is pregnant, she worries that she will lose Cole to some terrible tragedy, likely as a result of Janie’s actions. The fact that Hannah’s baby survives and only comes to harm through Hannah’s mistake is a substantial and ironic twist that adds nuance to the novel’s moral depiction of its characters: If Hannah is not entirely faultless, perhaps Janie is not wholly villainous.

“Her self-deprecation tugged at my heartstrings, and my anger started dissipating. This had to be hard for her. She didn’t understand that the baby wouldn’t take us away from her and that there was enough of our love to go around. She was just hurting. More of my anger drained. She was still curled on the floor, shaking.”

Because both of the story’s primary narrators are unreliable, it is impossible to tell how much of Janie’s behavior is genuine and how much of it is intentional manipulation. Christopher’s perspective is always loving, so he has nothing but empathy for Janie and sees her emotional pain as real, but he may be exaggerating the latter.

“I fell in love with my baby boy instantly, marveling at his perfection and that he’d lived inside me for so long. My feelings stemmed from the deepest parts of me. He wasn’t a stranger in my arms—it was like a missing piece of myself had been returned.”

When Hannah gives birth to Cole, her lifelong desire to be a parent is fulfilled and she feels like she is complete. Hannah’s attachment to Cole is particularly strong because she never expected to bear a child, and her description of how seeing him makes her feel underscores the intensity of the moment.

“Bones were like pieces of glass. When they broke, you put them back together again. That was what I was good at—fixing things. But I didn’t know how to fix this.”

Life at home is devolving into chaos and veering into dangerous territory, but Christopher is at a loss as to what to do about it. He compares the more straightforward process of fixing broken bones to trying to fix a “broken” family and finds that there are no similarities. Christopher is used to being able to solve whatever problem confronts him but is beginning to see how parenting changes a marriage as well as how Hannah’s own mental health is being affected by Janie’s presence.

“Breastfeeding was the one thing that made Cole’s crying bearable. I loved lying with him as he coiled his body around mine and staring at his tiny clasped fingers. In those moments, it didn’t matter that he cried all night long, and it made my utter exhaustion worthwhile.”

Raising Cole has been almost unbearable for Hannah thus far, as he never seems to stop crying. Breastfeeding is her one solace, and Janie takes that away by biting and injuring her. Hannah’s relationship with Janie is already at its breaking point, but this attack solidifies Hannah’s feelings of fear and hatred toward Janie.

“There was something about having her in the house again that sucked the air out of the room.”

Ambiguity creates suspense and questions about what the characters’ true intentions are and what the story’s outcome will be. Here, Hannah feels like Janie is changing the home environment—the metaphor of drained air suggests the house is becoming impossible to live in—but she isn’t exactly sure how, why, or whether it’s just her own dislike of Janie clouding her perception.

“Sociopaths didn’t have any feelings toward anyone, animals or otherwise, so Janie couldn’t be one because she had feelings. I’d seen them.”

Christopher constantly circles around in his own mind, making excuses for Janie and finding ways to look past her behavior without ever properly addressing it. Christopher is in denial about the type of person Janie really is and only sees an innocent child incapable of intentionally hurting anyone. Christopher’s willful ignorance exemplifies the sinister side of love and is why he ends up blamed for Allison’s death.

“Just the sound of her voice made my skin crawl. Waves of fear pummeled me. As soon as my heart sped up, so did my breathing. It was only a matter of seconds before I was gasping for air.”

Signs that Hannah’s mental health is declining come in the form of panic attacks and strange thoughts. In the story’s introduction, Hannah is rational and her narrative is logical, but the longer she is around Janie, the more she starts to see the world through her debilitating fear of her own adopted daughter.

“Christopher stared, taking it all in—Janie naked in the center of the room surrounded by toys, her food smashed all around her, empty juice boxes and broken toys.”

When Hannah narrates the moment that Christopher discovers she has been locking Janie in her room every day, there is a subtle undertone of arrogance and self-righteousness, as though she feels she has taken the best approach and nobody should criticize her for it. Hannah’s deterioration as a parent brings her down to the same level as Janie’s biological mother, Becky, who kept her daughter locked up.

“I wanted to speak, but I was locked in the background of my head and had lost the ability to communicate with the world outside me. The world pulsed and thrummed around me, warping my vision into blackening fear.”

Hannah’s descriptions of her own mental state draw the reader into her mind and illuminate her psychological experience. Her word choice suggests her inability to cope. Everything around her is reduced to a “pulse” and a “thrum”—words that connote the movement of blood and therefore underscore her sense of being “locked” inside her own body and experience. Hannah appears to be irrational or overreacting, but in truth her perception of Janie is accurate.

“What had happened that morning? It was the question that chased itself around and around like a snake trying to catch its tail.”

A simile compares the mystery of the morning Cole was injured to a snake chasing itself. In Western literature, snakes often symbolize something dark, sinister, or ill-intentioned, so the simile hints that Christopher has started to suspect that something horrible happened that day.

“I feel the ice cold breath of her demon. It blows on my neck while I’m feeding Cole. I can see the demon in her eyes when I look at her. The twisted grin on its face. It licks its fangs like it wants to hurt Cole.”

The diary entries in Cole’s baby book chart Hannah’s mental/emotional deterioration. The entries start out fearful and angry but still logical; as time goes on, Hannah’s sense of reality slips, and she starts to see Janie in the way that Becky did. Nevertheless, the similarity of the two women’s reactions opens up the possibility that there is something supernatural going on.

“But that’s the problem, Hannah. You can’t trust your mind anymore.”

Hannah’s doctor gaslights her into questioning her own perception of whether Janie was in fact trying to hurt her and Cole. Because Hannah started to see Janie as a demon, eventually trying to kill her, she has lost credibility not only with the other characters but also as a narrator; it is ultimately ambiguous just how much Hannah was imagining.