How did this tiny old woman get a ladder on car to drive over in the first place without her neighbors noticing? She’d lived in this house for years. I mean, let’s just look at the logistics of this. And I said, “What the actual heck?” out loud. But it was right there when I did the reread. I don’t know if I never noticed it before or if I had blocked it out. She had a whole ladder on the top of her car in that page’s illustration. Standing there would be slightly less creepy than crawling. Madam…why are you crawling? This is your house. She is on her hands and knees and peeking around the corner with her head almost all the way upside down like some kind of horror movie ghost. You see the boy sleeping and in the doorway you see the mom. When we jump from 9 to the teen years is where it is clear she has no respect for boundaries at all. But it still seems odd to do it when he’s not sick. When’s he 9, she goes into his room in the middle of the night and rocks him. It’s the continued nocturnal observations when the son is sleeping that would cue the ominous music in a horror movie. The strange clothes and music is something that we all go through. It really can feel like you’re living in a zoo with how loud and smelly teenagers can be. Now, the daytime portions of the book as the boy enters the teen years are accurate as all heck. Once he turns 9 is where it ratchets up to a concerning level. I sure as hell am not going to do it when he grows up and is no longer in my house. You have that underlying feeling of paranoia and you want to be sure. And this habit of watching him keeps on far longer than necessary. But that is not how it comes across at all. I know that they’re supposed to be “concerned” or “making sure he’s still breathing” eyes. While the prose on the page where she watches him sleep as a 2-year-old is sweet, the corresponding picture is creepy as hell. They’re aesthetically pretty, but also extremely unsettling. To be fair, the illustrations on the pages don’t help much at all.
However, this is also where the book subtly began to turn into more creepy than sweet. Those types of moments will always ring true. This is the idea that lion cubs are so cute so their mothers don’t eat them during especially challenging periods. When we were there, my friend I quoted earlier educated me on LCS or Lion Cub Syndrome.
The pages where she would see him sleeping like a little angel instead of the chaos demon hit home.
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