The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani
Why would a woman kill two children who, by all accounts, she adores? I mean, being a Nanny is hard, but, especially when you are working for such a fine family… who does that? There is a lot of good in this book even if, at the end of the day it really wasn’t my favorite. I was on board up until the last third. I think part of it was that Slimani had basically built up a situation that was high stakes enough that […]
The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani
I like thrillers, so when I saw The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani on NPR’s Best Books of 2018 List, I was expecting something like Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train. When I actually began reading, I found it wasn’t exactly as I was expecting. On the one hand, this is a good book. It is well written. There are imperfect characters, and universal themes of class and women’s roles that make you think. On the other hand, this book was pretty hard to read. It wasn’t so much […]
The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani
From my star rating, you can tell that I didn’t particularly like this novel. It’s really popular, sold a lot, won some prizes, and people seem to like it. I think it’s oddly generic and splits the difference between a serious literary novel, which I don’t think it quit gets to, and a good thriller, which it doesn’t quite get to, and takes the least good from each and coming up with a not particularly interesting novel. Some stray thoughts: in one way, this is […]
This book was like that itch between your shoulder blades you can never quite reach yourself. It was good, but I definitely did not enjoy reading it, if that makes sense. I just wanted it to be over. The very first chapter activates stress even when it essentially “spoils” the whole book – two young children are dead, murdered by their caretaker, their mother hysterical with grief. From there it flashes back in time to tell you how we got here and it is absolutely […]
