59 pages • 1 hour read
Lucinda BerryThe Perfect Child
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 41-52Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 41 Summary: “Christopher Bauer”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, child abuse, physical abuse, graphic violence, animal cruelty and death, and mental illness (including postpartum psychosis).
Christopher comes home one day to find Janie in soiled clothes that are hours old and confronts Hannah about taking better care of her. Hannah claims that Janie soils herself on purpose; Hannah doesn’t want to deal with it anymore. On another day, Janie takes Hannah’s phone, and Hannah becomes irate about it. To make matters worse, Christopher doesn’t want to believe that Janie did it and has everyone search for it as though Hannah lost it. When Christopher finds the phone in Janie’s room, he lies to Hannah about where he found it, making her believe she was mistaken.
Chapter 42 Summary: “Hannah Bauer”
When Janie takes Cole’s blanket, Hannah completely loses her patience and demands it back. She ends up finding it in Janie’s garbage can and threatens to send Janie’s cat away if Janie’s behavior doesn’t change. To prove that she doesn’t care about Hannah’s threats, Janie goes into her room and smothers the cat, killing it. She proudly shows Hannah what she did, and Hannah stares at the cat in shock. When she finds Janie standing over Cole, she screams at Janie to stay away from him.
Chapter 43 Summary: “Christopher Bauer”
Christopher tries to stay calm and console Hannah, but he’s more upset than he lets on. Hannah wants to send Janie away, but Christopher refuses, so Hannah insists on locking Janie’s room at night. Christopher can’t bring himself to do it and convinces Hannah to relent on the issue.
Chapter 44 Summary: “Hannah Bauer”
Hannah can’t bear to be around Janie since she killed the cat and tells Christopher she doesn’t want her anymore. Hannah doesn’t feel that she was ever really Janie’s mother or that Janie ever liked her at all. Now, she sees Janie as a monster and a threat. Christopher continues trying to defend Janie, even though a part of him knows that Hannah is right.
Interlude 13 Summary: “Case #5243 Interview: Piper Goldstein”
The police want to understand why nothing was done during a time of such severe crisis in the Bauers’ lives, but Piper has no answer. She explains that Christopher had to work to support the family and that Hannah refused to hire a nanny. When Ron asks why Piper never reported the incident with the cat, she claims it wasn’t intentional.
Chapter 45 Summary: “Christopher Bauer”
Christopher goes to see Dr. Chandler on his own, as Hannah no longer wants anything to do with Janie. Dr. Chandler agrees with Hannah’s concerns for the family’s safety and recommends placing Janie in a residential facility for young people with mental health conditions. Christopher hates the idea at first, believing that Janie will be abandoned and he will be a failure as a parent, but he knows it’s the right thing to do. When Christopher gets home, Hannah shows him Janie’s latest act of aggression. She scratched out Hannah’s face in every photograph of her she could find and did the same to every photo of Cole.
Chapter 46 Summary: “Hannah Bauer”
Christopher comes home early and finds Janie locked in her room, covered in feces. When Hannah admits that she locks Janie in there every day, Christopher slaps her.
Interlude 14 Summary: “Case #5243 Interview: Piper Goldstein”
The police criticize Piper for not reacting when she found out that Christopher hit Hannah, and Piper can’t argue with them.
Chapter 47 Summary: “Christopher Bauer”
Christopher gets a call from Hannah at work and comes right home. He finds Hannah holding Cole on the bathroom floor, mumbling to herself and unresponsive. Janie starts to cry. When Christopher sees that Cole is barely breathing, he starts performing CPR and yells at Hannah to call 911, but Hannah can barely blink.
Interlude 15 Summary: “Case #5243 Interview: Piper Goldstein”
Piper goes to see the Bauers at the hospital and finds them both in total distress. A hospital social worker named Holly is assigned to the case to determine if child abuse took place, and Piper tries to defend the Bauers. Cole has a head injury, which means that there is a possibility he was shaken or dropped, but Hannah won’t tell anyone what happened.
Chapter 48 Summary: “Christopher Bauer”
Christopher and Hannah stay at the hospital with Cole, and Holly comes to question them. Hannah won’t look at or speak to Holly, and Christopher would rather talk to Piper, but Holly was hired to investigate child abuse and remains assigned to them.
Chapter 49 Summary: “Hannah Bauer”
Hannah is perfectly aware of what’s going on around her but can’t bring herself to speak or otherwise interact with the world. She watches as Holly asks Christopher about possible child abuse; he argues that she’s accusing him. Hannah hates being spoken about as though she weren’t present but can’t say anything to stop it.
Interlude 16 Summary: “Case #5243 Interview: Piper Goldstein”
Piper explains that Hannah’s reaction to her son’s injuries was not atypical and that Cole didn’t show any other signs of being purposely hurt. Nevertheless, the children were removed from the Bauers’ custody long enough for an investigation to be completed.
Chapter 50 Summary: “Christopher Bauer”
The doctor announces that Cole’s surgery went well and that he is expected to fully recover. Christopher is relieved, but Hannah is overwhelmed with guilt and still in shock.
Interlude 17 Summary: “Case #5243 Interview: Piper Goldstein”
Piper is questioned about not noticing the fingerprint bruises on Janie’s neck, and she admits that she didn’t see them until she went to check on Janie at Allison’s house later on. When Piper told Janie that she would be staying with her aunt for a few days, she noticed the bruises, and her heart instantly sank. Luke points out that Piper didn’t report the bruises until three days after that.
Chapter 51 Summary: “Christopher Bauer”
Piper comes into Hannah and Christopher’s room at the hospital and tells them with chagrin that their children are being taken for a few days. Hannah instantly panics and holds Cole close to her, telling everyone to stay away from her. Hannah fears what could happen if Cole is left with Allison, who doesn’t know everything Janie is capable of. She backs up toward the window and threatens to jump out if anyone takes her baby, and then a psychiatric nurse comes and sedates Hannah.
Chapter 52 Summary: “Hannah Bauer”
Hannah wakes up in a psychiatric hospital in a daze. She is strapped to her bed and dehydrated, and when a nurse comes in to ask what happened, Hannah refuses to say anything. All Hannah can think about is how relieved she is to be safe and away from Janie.
Chapters 41-52 Analysis
The line between what is real and what is not real comes further into question as Hannah and Christopher’s narratives become increasingly unreliable, flooded with emotion and confusion. The change is particularly evident in Hannah’s narration. The strain of living in fear for herself and her son, of being seen as secondary, and of being asked to raise a child with whom she has no emotional bond causes her voice to become cloudy and dreamlike as she experiences a disconnect between the physical world and her own mind: “My mind told my body to speak the words, but it refused. The connection between the two was unplugged, severed” (278). She also comes to believe Janie is a demon. Though the novel has dropped previous hints in this direction, later events suggest that Hannah’s mental state may have lapsed into psychosis and that the belief is merely a delusion. Regardless, for Hannah, it justifies increasingly abusive behavior: Hannah starts neglecting Janie so severely that she increasingly resembles Becky, as it reaches a point where she allows Janie to lie in her own excrement. Her abuse culminates in the impulsive and reckless decision to try to drown Janie. Besides further undercutting Hannah’s reliability, this further traumatizes her; she knows deep down that she has drifted so far from the person she once was, a nurse who treated the ill and the injured and whose main duty in life was to help people heal.
Christopher undergoes a parallel though less extreme descent into abusiveness when he strikes Hannah. This is out of character for Christopher and a significant example of How Parenting Changes a Marriage; his allegiances now lie almost exclusively with Janie rather than with his wife or other child. Both the violence itself and its motivation further undermine Christopher’s credibility as a narrator. Even when Christopher finally agrees that he and Hannah are not equipped to raise Janie, it is like giving up a part of himself and admitting to his failure as a parent. Christopher never starts hating Janie, no matter what she does, and this dynamic, which defines their relationship, is central to the exploration of The Sinister Side of Unconditional Love.
Even Piper’s reliability comes increasingly into question in these chapters as the police repeatedly draw attention to her errors in judgment. The effect is to destabilize any sense of reality, ratcheting up the tension surrounding the novel’s climax.
Janie’s escalating behavior contributes to the suspense as well. She is now committing acts of extreme violence like killing her cat. Indeed, she seems to have little concern for even her own life: That Hannah seems more affected by the near drowning than Janie is both ironic and further indication that there is something “off” about Janie, though whether that something is a mental health condition or a supernatural phenomenon remains ambiguous.
The story’s rising action teeters on the brink of tragedy as Cole nearly dies and Hannah nearly becomes a murderer not once but twice. Hannah’s darkest moment comes when she threatens to jump out the window with her own baby in her arms, somehow believing it is the only solution to keeping Cole away from Janie. Underneath it all, The Desire to Be a Parent and to protect her one and only biological child is what is motivating Hannah, but her actions also represent the dark side of love, as she nearly kills Cole in her willingness to “protect” him at any cost.
