Ooh, misbehaving children and technology! Are ya scared yet? No? Me neither.
Rowan comes across an ad looking for a live-in nanny at a remote country estate. When she applies and nabs the job, she is thrilled. But it seems the opportunity is too good to be true, and there are malevolent forces at work inside the idyllic house. The story is told with the reveal first, as a child is dead and Rowan is sitting in prison writing to her lawyer pleading that she did not kill the child. She then proceeds to tell him the story of what really happened.
And here is my first issue with this story: Rowan spends a good amount of time in the initial chapters telling her lawyer (and us readers) how important it is that he hears the whole story, every little detail, in order to understand her side. But the truth isn't that complicated and can be summed up in a few sentences. Yet she goes on and on about how he can't possibly understand if she left anything out. Honestly, this style of foreshadowing drives me crazy. If the only way to achieve suspense is to tell your readers repeatedly that the good part is coming, maybe your story isn't that suspenseful?
It doesn't help that Rowan isn't particularly likable or relatable. She exercises poor judgement over and over. Who would jump into a job that four people had previously vacated in just one year? To a regular person, this would raise red flags and they would proceed with caution, but she didn't even ask any questions. And then as odd things start to happen, she didn't reach out to the parents or another adult. She comes across as very melodramatic and silly, and it's hard to feel for her as she works herself into bad situations.
The majority of this story is Rowan trying to get the nanny job (100 pages), and then watching misbehaving children while smart technology around the house also misbehaves (another 170 pages). It wasn't until the last 60 pages that the book got somewhere. I just don't find reading page after page of bratty children acting out to be that interesting nor malfunctioning smart technology to be that scary. When we finally get to the unraveling of the mystery, the twists are pretty unimaginative and straightforward. And the ending was rushed and incomplete, and it left a whole bunch of things unexplained.
This is my third Ruth Ware book, and they've all been fairly disappointing. The premise always seems intriguing, and the mysteries themselves have a lot of potential. But the way they are written, and in particular how stupid and self-defeating the female characters are, make the stories real downers. I keep hanging on, hoping the author would mature and work out some of these story-telling tics, but it hasn't happened yet.
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