The Perfect Nanny
A Novel
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3.4 • 925 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
One of The New York Times’s 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century
One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2018
*Soon to be an HBO series starring Nicole Kidman and Maya Erskine*
She has the keys to their apartment. She knows everything. She has embedded herself so deeply in their lives that it now seems impossible to remove her.
“A great novel . . . Incredibly engaging and disturbing . . . Slimani has us in her thrall.” —Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
“One of the most important books of the year. You can’t unread it.” —Barrie Hardymon, NPR’s Weekend Edition
When Myriam decides to return to work as a lawyer after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their son and daughter. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family’s chic Paris apartment, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment, and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau. Building tension with every page, The Perfect Nanny is a compulsive, riveting, bravely observed exploration of power, class, race, domesticity, motherhood, and madness—and the American debut of an immensely talented writer.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This gripping suspense novel is loosely based on the real-life case of Yoselyn Ortega, a Manhattan nanny charged with killing two young children under her care. Leïla Slimani won France’s most prestigious literary prize for this chilling story, which explores parenting and class privilege via the interactions of a professional Parisian couple and their seemingly flawless employee: Louise, an obsessive woman with a troubled history. Slimani’s novel is seriously creepy and very well written.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Slimani received France's Goncourt Prize for this unsettling tale of a nanny who insinuates herself into every aspect of her employers' lives, with tragic results. When Parisian housewife Myriam Mass accepts a job as a lawyer, she and her husband, Paul, hire Louise, an unassuming, doll-like woman in her 40s, to watch their two children. Initially enamored of Louise's quiet competence, delicious cooking, and constant availability, Myriam and Paul eventually find her dominating their lives in unwelcome ways. As they steel themselves for a confrontation, Louise preempts them in a shocking act of violence. Slimani expertly probes Myriam's guilt at leaving her children with a stranger and the secret economy of nannies in Paris's tony professional districts. Taylor's spare, understated translation underscores the quiet desperation, economic struggles, and crushing loneliness that build to Louise's final act. Those seeking a thought-provoking character study will appreciate this gripping anatomy of a crime.
Customer Reviews
Great, but not for everyone
The book is slow-paced, and sometimes a difficult read. You have to be able to embody the character and notice the minute details which give away some of the chilling thoughts. People complain about the end but I actually think it pieced it together nicely, it’s just not your average ending and not for those used to reading novels where everything has a proper explanation. This book imitates reality, in which we do not always have all the pieces to understand why things happen.
Not one I’d recommend
Aside from being a dark and depressing story, her writing style was hard for me to stay engaged in and seemed to run in different directions. I found myself skipping a head and the end was abrupt.
The Perfect Nanny
Great read but ending sucked, it’s like all that for nothing in the end