Review: "What the Nanny Saw" by Fiona Neill

Interesting genre, the nanny literature. A close sister of the governess literature and sometimes a twin of the chick lit. As confessed in an earlier post, I have a thing for books about nannies. Not sure why but it is a topic that interests me so when I saw that Fiona Neill, who has previously made me laugh out loud when I read her book "The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy", had written a book about a nanny, I had to read it. 


Ali Sparrow is an English Lit student who is barely making end meets so when she sees an advertisement seeking a nanny for a busy, professional London family, she takes a year off to improve her financial situation. She's quite ambiguous about the whole thing but the money is too much of a temptation so suddenly she finds herself abandoning her life as a poor student to move in at one of the most expensive, posh addresses in London. It is a different world. Bryony and Nick has everything that money can buy except from time for their kids so Ali has to learn how to deal with four kids, a housekeeper and the other nannies in the neighbourhood. Yes, that is about as difficult as it sounds. 


How would you deal with young twins speaking in their own, private, invented language? Or a teenage girl with bulimia and goth tendencies? Or a teenage boy who sticks to himself and is very difficult to "nanny"? 
Not easy right? And we haven't even gotten to the adults yet... The controlling grandparents, the picture perfect wife and the banker husband. It takes all her social skills to navigate that cast of more or less eccentric characters is great fun! 


It's a light read, created for entertainment and sure to make you laugh. As a comedy it works wonderfully. However, it is also an attempt at a commentary on the financial crisis, on greed, on bankers who earn vast sums of money and spend it on champagne but it doesn't work well as a reprimand. Neill should have stuck to what she does best: commentary on the haves and the haves-more-than-you-ever-imagined. Her observations about the ways of the astronomically rich upper class Londoners is hilarious, she does that better than anyone else. 


Read it if: You subscribe to The Times mainly to read the "Slummy Mummy" column. You don't mind stereotypes as long as they're funny. 

Move over Mary Poppins!

We've probably all been there - working as a nanny. Some of us only a few times, watching kids while their parents were out for dinner or at the cinema, others of you readers may have worked as au pairs or live-in nannies. Or some of you might be planning to. I have only done the occasional night of babysitting but I have a thing for nanny novels. I love reading about nannies, not sure why but I do. So here are three good nanny novels:

"What the Nanny Saw" by Fiona Neill
Ali is an English student fighting to make enough money to make it through university so when she spots an opportunity to take a year out from university and come back debt-free, she jumps at it. Soon she finds herself at the center of the family living in the most expensive villa on Holland Park Crescent in London. The Skinners are filthy rich and as both mum and dad works long hours in the world of finance, Ali is left with a lot of responsibility for the children: two teenagers and a pair of four-year-old twins. When the family's life is shook by the downfall of Lehman Brothers, Ali has to decide where her loyalty lies and fight to separate her own personal life from her job as a nanny.

"The Diary of an American Au Pair" by Marjorie Leet Ford
Newly jobless and with a wedding just cancelled, Melissa wants to make a real change in her life so she takes on a job as a live-in nanny with a London family. Arriving in the United Kingdom with a suitcase full of romantic fantasies about life in London, she soon realises that these are indeed just fantasies. She is regarded as a bit of a curiosity - an American girl - and finds it hard adjusting to a life which is very much led under the motto of "Make do or mend". Fresh bathwater and heating is seen as a luxury even though she gets to visit splendid castles and meet fascinating people. It is a steep learning curve and perfect if you are considering moving to the United Kingdom.

"The Nanny Diaries" by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
Manhattan mums seem to spend very little time actually mothering their children in this novel. Instead they get their hair and make-up done, have time for facials and shopping and spend large amounts of money decorating and re-decorating after which they host parties to show if the re-decorations and the new clothes. Nanny is a young lady who works as a nanny for one of these mums. Her charge is the cutest little boy whom a flux of nannies and a lack of maternal love has left insecure and lonely. As the story progresses, Nanny grows to love him and he learns to trust her as they both struggle to survive in a household where a nanny is worth less than a Hermes bag and where a little boy is just an accessory.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books that made me cry

I actually wrote this post yesterday but then my computer crashed and I never got to publish it, so here we go :-)

I just found a new meme that I have to participate in: Top Ten Tuesday! Normally I do teaser tuesday but I think I will save my teaser for tomorrow - or for later tonight - and do the Top Ten instead. The Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish at http://brokeandbookish.blogspot.com/2010/11/top-ten-tuesday-top-ten-books-that-made.html

As you have guessed, it is a list of ten books that made you cry. Now I don't cry a lot over books, movie etc. so some of these go years back. But here we go.

1) "Anne of Green Gables" by L.M. Montgomery. When I reread this book, I always dread the part where Matthew dies. It is so incredibly sad.

2)"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" by J.K. Rowling. The way Dumbledore is push out of Hogwarts which is then taken over by the Ministry of Magic and turned into a soviet-like terror regime is so scary. It actually, really made me cry.

3)"Christiane F." by Christiane F. I read this two or three times as a teen and it always made me cry. The story is so sad, the way the addicts will do anything for drugs, relinquishing their lives and their souls for a fix is so sad.

4)"The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank. Anything about the Holocaust will make me cry but especially this book, it is so sad. It should be a mandatory read in all schools.

5)"The Diary of a Slummy Mummy" by Fiona Neill. Whenever I need to read and laugh out lot - til the teas roll - I get out the stories about Lucy "Slummy Mummy" Sweeney and her misadventures. These are many and varied and include breaking and entering, stashing cigarettes in her boots and having a crush on a yummy stay-at-home dad with a healthfreak complex.

6) "Black Beauty" by Anna Sewell. I loved horses and when I was a little girl this one was sure to make me cry.

I am not sure that I can think of any more to put on here - I really don't cry a lot when I read. However, when I do cry it is usually related to children or animals not being treated well. I hate that the and the unfairness of it always makes me emotional.

"The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy" - Bridget Jones meets Anne of Green Gables

This must be the fourth or fifth time I read the "The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy" by Fiona Neill and though I am not normally a lover of chick lit, I love this book. Simply love it. It is a comforting as a hug or a cup of warm chocolate. Basically it is the story of Lucy Sweeney, wife of neurotic/perfectionistic architect Tom and mother of Sam, Joe and Fred. She is a stay-at-home mum who battles through mountains of spaghetti bolognese to be cooked and laundry to be washed. It is a constant battle and Lucy rarely wins. Instead she gets into a number of mishaps and scrapes, one more embarrassing than the other. Like dying her eyebrows black (a perfect Anne of Green Gables moment), breaking and entering into the home of Yummy Mummy No 1, dealing with bailiffs and not-so-secretly fancying Sexy Domesticated Dad who is a stay-at-home dad with the perfect organic life.
It is a wild rollercoaster ride of funny stories and great moments and I have to say that I love Lucy. Actually the whole story of Lucy began in The Times where Fiona Neill has a column about Slummy Mummy and her many (mis)adventures among the Alpha mums and Yummy Mummies of North London - and she is still there. So every now and then when I need a boost of smiling energy, I google slummy mummy and see what happens in Lucy's life.
Here a little something from a column from 2006 - it features in the book as well:
Spot Yummy Mummy No 1 on the pavement outside school on the first day of term. She is sporting that inverted panda look favoured by Easter skiers: white eyes set amid a deep brown tan.
'Good holiday?' I ask her after the drop-off.

'Les Arcs, with friends,' she says. 'Fantastic snow. How about you?'

'Les Mendips,' I say in a French accent. 'With my parents. There was a fresh cover over Easter.'

'I haven't heard of that resort. Is it in Bulgaria?' she asks.

'It's a bit farther west,' I say vaguely.

'Off piste? Tricky runs?' she asks, using verbal shorthand to indicate the imminent closure of our incipient discussion on the merits of ski resorts. Sure enough I see a herd of yummy mummies with identical tans waving at her from the other side of the road.

I think of the tense hour spent roaming small villages in the Avon Valley after I simultaneously forgot to tell Husband on a Short Fuse to turn off the M4 and then discovered that a key page covering said villages was missing from our road map.

'Dramatic,' I say. 'We covered a lot of ground.' Including arguments about 1) why our clothes were packed in plastic bags instead of suitcases, 2) how despite the plethora of plastic bags in the boot, there were none available for episodes of car sickness, and 3) on what grounds we ever considered ourselves compatible enough for marriage.