I bought this on Amazon for like a pound a few months ago and when I was scrolling through my Kindle app I came across it and thought I would give it a go. However, I thought it just wasn't very good and it lost its way quite a bit. It felt like it was trying to join a zeitgeist of books like The Housemaid, but just didn't quite manage it for me.
So, Lily needs to escape her life in London. She has been living with a man called Nick and he was abusive towards her. She left, was holed up in a hotel room, and started looking online for jobs. The Rowes needed a nanny. They have a huge gothic manor in Cornwall and they want a live in nanny for their children, Betsy and William. Lily is perfect and she quickly accepts the job and makes her way down there.
The mother is Laurie. She is American and in her early forties. She is a painter. She seems to flip between liking Lily and resenting her. She somewhat takes Lily under her wing and wants her to wear her clothes and borrow her things etc. She often seems a lot younger and less mature than she ought to be. At night she goes for walks in the grounds, but why?
The dad is Charlie. He is fifty odd so a lot older than Laurie. The house has been in his family for generations, etc etc. He is a bit of a stuffed shirt. I did have some sympathy for him when some of his backstory came out, but I didn't really like him at all.
The children may as well not be there. They are precocious and terrible and Lily is a terrible nanny. No one is allowed to talk about the previous nanny, Nina. But there is also a hot gardener - of course there's a hot gardener - and he starts to tell Lily about the past.
The book is trying to be Rebecca but failing miserably. The 'gothic' part of it just didn't work well for me. The setting is good but I just didn't like the story. I'm giving it two and a half out of five.
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