Rowan works at a London daycare with the suitably horrible name Little Nippers. Though she likes the children, she dislikes her coworkers and the put-upon, complaining parents that she has to deal with. She lives in a cramped, run-down apartment, which she shares with a coworker who is now on Sabbatical. So when she finds a job ad for a live-in nanny on a country estate in the Scottish Highlands, she does whatever she can to get the job. It doesn’t go well; the book begins with Rowan in prison, a suspect in the death of one of the children.
I’m a member of a fair number of book-related facebook groups and one of the most frequent requests made is for thrillers with shocking plot twists. So apparently I’m in the minority here, but: I really fucking hate those stupid plot twists. Sure, they can be great if they’re well executed; one of my all-time favourite books is Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which also has a surprising twist at the end. The thing is, though, that in Atonement, there is a clear motive for doing so other than simple shock value. In this case, the entire novel’s goal seems to be to put the reader on the wrong foot, and I kind of hate it. It almost never works because authors less skilled than McEwan have to twist themselves into all sorts of narrative corners to keep the reader from guessing the surprise they planned, and it all just feels forced. The Turn of the Key isn’t the worst offender, and at least the story wasn’t as baffling as the dire The Woman in Cabin 10, but it’s pretty bad.
Other than that, the novel is an engaging and fun read. As a retelling of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw it doesn’t really work, but whatever – I’m not exactly Henry James’s biggest fan and I’m totally find with finding inspiration in the stories of others. Rowan makes a few predictably stupid decisions and there’s the expected romance subplot. I liked the way the children are portrayed; they’re neither deified, nor are they precocious angels. And Rowan, as a nanny, isn’t a saint either: the children wear her down and she doesn’t always know how to handle them, but she does try and she does care.
Really, most of the novel was pretty entertaining; I read the entire thing in one Saturday afternoon. It has a decent ghost story/haunted house/eat the rich-vibe, and despite the fact that I hate foreshadowing, the idea of Rowan telling her story from prison is an engaging one. I absolutely hated the ending, though, both because of the hamfisted twists and because Ware leaves Rowan’s fate up for grabs. I understand this from a storytelling point of view but it just made me feel frustrated.