Nanny Returns Book

I listened to the first Nanny novel as an audiobook many moons ago when I was working as a painter in college. Our local library had a paltry selection of audiobooks and I couldn't afford to be picky. I thought I would hate The Nanny Diaries, but instead I found myself enjoying the book. When I heard the authors had penned a sequel, I was curious enough to get the audiobook of Nanny Returns for my commute.

At some points, I felt like Nanny Returns actively hated me and was trying to physically hurt me, that's how bad I thought it was.

At the core of The Nanny Diaries was a resentment toward the non-parenting of the Upper West Side snobs of New York City. That drove the book, with the hook of having the titular Nanny function as a "fish out of water" in that scenario, seemingly the only person who cared for her employers' child. I honestly don't know what the reason for writing Nanny Returns was, besides "Hey, that first Nanny book made some money and we got a movie out of it... how about a sequel?"

The book flails around for a point, introducing plot after plot after plot (Nan's qualms about starting a family, her new job, reintergrating herself into the X's life, calamities at the private schools of the wealthy, and yes, disdain for the richie rich parents of New York City) with almost no followthrough. The main character alternates between whiny and callow, displaying none of the backbone I expected from the ending of the first Nanny novel.

Dialog between the characters is infuriatingly choppy; people break away from delivering vital information to one another by stopping mid-conversation and saying something like "I can't deal with you right now," or "Hold on a sec." The only purpose for this is to prolong "funny" confusion on the part of the main character. It's stilted and annoying. Nan will keep things from other characters (like the key piece of information that she was fired from her nanny position) and then spend dozens of pages sweating and angsting over a problem that could likely be address if she'd just SAY WHAT WAS ON HER MIND.

The overwrought descriptions of fashion slow the narrative down to a crawl at places. I guess this is "chick-lit", a genre that I know doesn't always aspire toward highbrow literature, but goodness, I never realized that anyone would care to read a blow-by-blow of what every character in a room was wearing from top to tail.

Even the jokey premise behind Nan's foils, the elder X matriarch and patriarch, seems lame now. The joke in the first novel was that Nan was maintaining their anonymity by calling them the X's. Here, the authors expand the X's out so far into the world that it seems incredibly stupid to keep up the charade. We know EVERYBODY else's name in this book. It's silly.

Again, I can actually recommend The Nanny Diaries, a book with some genuine anger expressed through a oftentimes funny story told with warmth. Nanny Returns was just repulsive.