Book Review: Leila Slimani - The Perfect Nanny

As someone without kids I don't have any personal experience with needing childcare, but regardless, this novel was a riveting exploration of how the need to outsource the care of your child creates all kinds of other needs in yourself, and how the relationship between a nanny and their family is far more complicated than mere employee and employer. I wouldn't even call this a whodunit - the nanny did it, as you learn in the first chapter - so it's not the plot mechanics that make it so engrossing, it's the exploration of how and why it came to pass that a seemingly perfect and indispensable nanny could murder the 2 children in her care, and how being a mother can create feelings of guilt and insecurity even when you know you're doing the right thing - when you feel like you have to solve every problem, that feeling itself can be a vulnerability. There's a twist on the familiar race and class angle (the family is Moroccan-French like Slimani herself, while the nanny is white French), but for the most part the book is about need: what do you do with the knowledge that you're outsourcing perhaps the most important job of all, that you're helpless without someone and dependent on them for the things you love most? There's no happy answers here, but it is a very engrossing, lurid exposition of those questions.