"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."
As you can guess from this quote and the title, this tensely written book explores the lives of a family and the woman who is hired as their nanny, and how their lives start to intertwine to an uncomfortable extent. In fact, the book begins with something pretty shocking, so you are set up to understand that things probably began pretty normally with this nanny and then something went wrong.
Myriam is the mother, a lawyer who decides to return to work after having children and finding it a bit overwhelming (and depressing) to be at home with them all day. Louise seems quiet and devoted to the children, even cleaning the family's apartment and staying late with no complaints. It seems clear that the family needs Louise and they treat her as part of the family --- but not quite all of the time. This story explores the relationships between people when there are situations of employer-employee, class, race, and expectations of motherhood.
I actually wanted to like this book more than I did. I didn't warm up completely to the characters and didn't always find them interesting, which for me is important. I don't need to like characters, but if I find them too predictable or not interesting, the book can become a bit of a chore. I was curious to see how the story explored the relationship of Louise to the family and she is an interesting character, although at times difficult to understand. Per Goodreads, this book is "The #1 international bestseller and winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt." Apparently, this was a case of "every person has their book" and for me, this wasn't my book. I felt the storyline was predictable and almost too familiar at times, so while I kept reading out of curiosity, I just didn't feel the book was compelling.
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