This is an intense and crazy little book. It’s like a combination of Adventures in Babysitting and The Bad Seed, or what would happen if I let my bad little kitten babysit.
So the novel begins with a a married couple preparing in a hotel to go out to an event held in the honor of the husband. He is to give a speech! As they’re preparing, their babysitting plans for their 9 year old daughter “Bunny” fall through and they have to decide between the mother staying with her, cancelling, or taking up the kindly elevator operator’s offer to call his 19 year old niece to come to the hotel to stay with the child.
They decide to take up the offer, and so “Nell” shows up. She doesn’t talk much, she doesn’t ask questions, and she seems a little too keen to snatch at an offer of candy.
When they leave, well, shit hits the fans. It begins with Nell immediately rummaging through their clothes looking for lingerie and perfume. We get a little scene where her elevator operator uncle comes to check on her and this conversation indicates this is a kind of pattern of hers he’d hope she’d gotten over.
She has not. She immediately hangs out the window and calls down to some kind of local hustler who happens to be walking by. He takes her up on her offer to come into the hotel and meet up with the strange girl who called out to him from the window — as you do. And it goes from there.
This book is all about tempo and pacing. There’s no stopping, and there’s a snowball effect through. It can’t sustain for much more than 100 pages, but it was really good and entertaining, especially thinking about it in its context of 1950.
I think there could be a great film version of this (if there isn’t already) involving a babysitting app that gives way to a Tindr like app and goes from there.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Mischief-Charlotte-Armstrong/dp/B00005WGMH)