Title: The Nanny Diaries
Author: Nicola Kraus & Emma McLaughlin
Series: Nanny #1
Rating Out of 5: 4.5 (Amazing, but not quite perfect)
My Bookshelves: Chic lit, Contemporary, Easy reading
Pace: Fast
Format: Novel
Publisher: Penguin Books
Year: 2002
5th sentence, 74th page: I take a little bit of pleasure from the fact that Mrs. X is forced to lean across and pin the card on Grayer herself as she has the use of all ten of her fingers.

Nan has a tricky relationship with her employer, Mrs X.
A non-existent relationship with Mr X.
But she loves their little boy to pieces.

In between looking after four-year-old Grayer and running a thousand errands for Mrs X, his rich, uptight Manhattanite mother, Nan is trying to have a life. There’s college, shopping, her friends, her cat George. And the gorgeous Harvard boy from the sixth floor…

But the X family’s dramas keep intruding – visits from Mr X’s predatory mistress, catastrophic family outings and, as a final straw, the case of the marriage-drawing panties. As Divorce looms, Nan realizes how attached she’s become to the Xs’ underloved son – and how nannying has become more than just a job.

Funny, touching and true-to-life, The Nanny Diaries is a modern-day Mary Poppins story – with attitude.

The last few seems to involve a lot of me watching old favourite movies and realising that they were originally a novel of some kind. And The Nanny Diaries was one of these… so it was immensely exciting to find the novel and bury my nose in it.

Although the key points of the storyline kept very close to the movie, there was a lot more sass and emotional turmoil throughout the novel. Mostly I loved the sass. Nan is completely aware of the position she’s put in, and she’s not impressed. Which of course, makes her incredibly pithy and sarcastic in many of her internal monologue moments. My biggest frustration with the movie was that the main character seemed to be a little more willing to handle the craziness of the X’s. Although she’s still more than willing to put up with this in the novel, she constantly crabby and has multiple mental-break-down moments. So much more realistic (but then, the books always are).

You can tell that The Nanny Diaries is written by someone who actually used to be a nanny. There is a level of realism and authenticity to the story that I would never be able to create. And it is a great introduction to a world that I know nothing about. And, honestly, never will. Normally when I visit foreign worlds in the pages of a book, it is off to some fantasy land like Narnia or Hogwarts. It was actually incredibly enjoyable to read a story that swept me away to somewhere far closer.

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Image source: Goodreads