Upon her retirement in 1948, Crawford was given Nottingham Cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace, as a grace and favour home. Queen Mary, the princesses' grandmother, also provided it with antique furniture and flower prints as a mark of her appreciation. [8] I was fascinated how Slimani often portrayed Louise's role as one between child and grown-up: Like a kid's, Louise's choices are limited, she has to obey to the parents of the kids she is watching, and due to her circumstances, she has never learnt to adequately adress her needs and demands. She is trapped in her own powerlessness that can easily tip over into rage. The effect of the story itself is heightened by the language Slimani chooses and that she herself described as "clinical". I am not going to spoil the details, but Slimani ventures into the nanny's family history and living circumstances to enlighten her motives and actions (without excusing them, of course), and I found it very well done. To see through the eyes of this murderess is a truly claustrophobic experience. Another aspect that is brought up in this context is race: On the playground, Louise is the only non-immigrant nanny. I read this with a morbid fascination, a sadness, an anger. How many times could urban tragedies be prevented if we intervene not just with a kind word but real action, and small sacrifice ? She has been estranged from her Mother for thirty years, but she must put her own daughter, Ruby, first, so with nowhere else to go, the pair leave California, for the very atmospheric Lake Hall, in England.

Nannies make great characters in fiction because they’re outsiders who’ve been invited into the heart of a family. If the word Nanny reminds you of Mary Poppins, Nanny McPhee or even Fran Drescher (you remember), then this book may force you to do a rethink. I do feel, most definitely, that you should not write and sign articles about the children, as people in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster. If you, the moment you finished teaching Margaret, started writing about her and Lilibet, well, we should never feel confidence in anyone again. Since we know WHO, the driving force of this tense character profile is WHY? As in real life, we see glimpses of madness in a person, but rarely is there a definable answer as to why someone would commit such a heinous act. Instead, it is a combination of inexplicable factors in a disturbed mind that may quietly lead to violence. And, unfortunately, when it comes to stories of caretakers who just up and went “poof” in the night, I kinda liked The Au Pair better.There’s no real story. Paul and Myriam hire Louise to look after their little ones, Mila and Adam, while they pursue their careers. We learn a bit about Louise’s sad life – her wayward daughter, her deadbeat husband who saddles her with debt and the broken-down studio flat she lives in – but it’s barely a story and definitely not an entertaining one at that.

These go-getters take advantage of the Nanny. They hired her and paid her just to be a nanny – and she’s WONDERFUL, but it’s in her nature to do everything. She cooks and cleans and does laundry perfectly. So they got a cook and a laundress and a maid for free. The only extra they ever do for her is to take her with them on vacation in Greece - so she can watch the kids of course. The Nanny can’t imagine life without her ‘family’ and despairs of what will happen to her when both children start school and the couple no longer needs her.Courtiers believed that Crawford was deeply under the influence of her husband George Buthlay, whom she married after her retirement, and that he pressured her to capitalise on her royal connections, as he himself did. Buthlay boasted of it in his business transactions, and had her ask the royal family to change their bank account to Drummonds, the bank for which he worked. [8] One of my favorite things about the audiobook is that there are multiple narrators. There’s one for Hannah, the nanny, Jocelyn, the detective on the case, and an unreliable, unnamed narrator. The narration is almost eerie and adds to the suspenseful nature of the plot. I definitely was caught up in the plot. I thought I had it figured out for a while, then I realized I didn't, and then the ending was a little crazy. I'm still not a 100% sure about it, but I appreciate Macmillan for embracing it. Overall, I enjoyed the varying viewpoints and the slightly fusty, aristocratic setting. I was interested in the characters and wondering what happened with Hannah. A few things seemed a little far-fetched, hence my 3.5-star rating, but still a good read.

Both of Slimani's novels thus far have delved into the darkest of devastations on both the sufferers of mental illness and to those around them in a way I've yet to experience from another author. For those thriller readers who don’t like an unbelievable twist, you can be rest assured that you won’t find any here, everything that happens is believable, if not a bit predictable, but I think Macmillan’s intention was to explore, rather than surprise. When a bunch of women are thrown together in a big drafty house, all acting on different levels of privilege, jealousy is bound to arise as each person vies for power of one another. The pesky matter of a surfacing corpse and subsequent police investigation pale in comparison to the emotional war being fought within the family circle. The writing is fantastic, however. My favorite parts of this novel is the author's prose, with the only exception being that sometimes the chapters became choppy with whose point of view we were supposed to be in. I'm not sure if that is lost in the translation of the novel or not. Either way, you definitely cannot take away from her talent. I can understand why she won the Goncourt award. The book starts off with a lot of potential as I'm always up for a story revolving around long-held family secrets. But gradually, I found myself being annoyed with Jocelyn and at some point I just stopped caring if something good or bad was going to happen to her. Now her mother, Virginia, at least was an intriguing woman. This book starts out with a bang. The very first chapter tells us of two children who have been murdered in their nursery, as well as their nurse who is the main suspect and who's found in a coma.The story is told in the third person with a spare prose that leaves the reader feeling a bit detached, which adds to the sinister mood and mounting dread. There are warning signs that all was not well with the nanny psychologically, and I couldn’t help but wonder if just one person had intervened if things would have turned out differently. Ferguson makes the will-they-won’t-they sing with complex emotional shading and a strong sense of inevitability to her protagonists’ connection…Rosie Danan fans should snap this up.”— Publishers Weekly, starred review Overall, A wonderful romance with really solid story and character development. I definitely recommend this one for fans of the genre. We know what happens but what we don't know is the why. There are no easy answers, and this book doesn't offer them. It was inspired by the true case of the nanny who killed two children in NYC in 2012, and some aspects of the crime are eerily similar. Not knowing the why makes it all the more horrific.