Perfect Nanny (Slimani) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[An] unnerving cautionary tale.… Pretty radical for a domestic thriller, but what’s more remarkable about this unconventional novel is the author’s intimate analysis of the special relationship between a mother and a nanny.… Slimani writes devastatingly perceptive character studies.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review


Brilliantly observed.… Slimani is brilliantly insightful about the peculiar station nannies assume within the households of working families.
Wall Street Journal


A slim page-turner, The Perfect Nanny can be read in a single, shivery sitting.… A chilling domestic thriller.… It will make a great film.
Economist


This brutal chiller has the same compulsive readability as Emma Donoghue’s Room.
Guardian


A year ago, I picked up a book … that I’ve thought about pretty much every day since.… [It] felt less like an entertainment, or even a work of art, than like a compulsion. I found it extraordinary.… If you are a mother, whatever kind of mother you aspire to be, you’ll know what kind of mother you are after reading Slimani. If you are not a mother, the insights that she administers can be no less jolting.… Like Jenny Offill, Slimani can write ravishingly of female bodies, even postpartum ones.… The novelist Rachel Cusk has chronicled what motherhood did to her; Slimani examines what mothering is doing to society.
Lauren Collins - New Yorker


I think this might be one of the most important books of the year. You can’t unread it.… If you’ve ever taken care of a kid, even if, just on a bus, someone has handed you a child for five seconds as they rummage through their purse, this will do something to you.… At the end of reading this book, I was so devastated, but I really felt like I was looking at the world through new eyes.
Barrie Hardymon - NPR’s Weekend Edition


[A] slim dagger of a novel.… You won't move until you reach the last page.
People


[An] unsettling tale of a nanny who insinuates herself into every aspect of her employers’ lives, with tragic results.… Those seeking a thought-provoking character study will appreciate this gripping anatomy of a crime.
Publishers Weekly


[A] spare domestic thriller.… What initially feels like routine, unremarkable women's fiction morphs into a darkly propulsive nail-biter overlain with a vivid and piercing study of class tensions.
Library Journal


A devastating, entrancing, literary psychological drama supported by absorbing character studies.… Readers won’t be able to look away.
Booklist


Since the book opens with the murders, leaving no doubt as to the culprit, the reader quickly gathers that the inquiry here is not who did it but why.… [But] the why…remains unfathomable, rendering it all the more frightening.
Kirkus Reviews