The Perfect Nanny

I found the story compelling as the beginning told us how it would end. It focuses on parents with two kids who hire a nanny so that the wife can return to work. At first she is perfect. Then not so much. The focus is on the nanny as the book flashbacked to her life prior to becoming one. So we start to see the cracks appear in her well-ordered life. The parents did as well but were, overall, so happy with how the nanny enhanced the lives of the whole family that they turned a blind eye. So much that towards the end of the book the parents had stopped interacting with the nanny, like ships passing in the night. I had to read the ending again and then go back and re-read the beginning to feel the jolt of the story. While the characters were not terribly likable, it's a compelling story of how we allow ourselves to be deceived when we get some benefit out of it.

This one upset my apple cart in the best way possible! I was supremely uncomfortable and enjoyed every minute of it.
I actually have been a nanny, in the distant past, not this kind of nanny, mind you! But I was disturbed to find myself empathizing with the monotony, the blurred and uncomfortably changing boundaries, the politics with the parents...and this empathy made the novel's claustrophobia that much creepier for me. This novel is the perfect illustration of how someone can get lost in their head so easily and convince themselves of nearly anything. The danger of that, I think, lurks in all of our psyches.