Product Description

How can you not love Melissa? She's so charming and so real - worrying about her sweet tooth and her weight, blowing hot and cold about her fianc back in the States, trying her best to decipher her testy employer's language. (Directed to prepare a "cot" for the youngest of her charges, she is chastised disgustedly. The small bed she carefully made is NOT a cot!A cot is what the benighted Americans call a crib.)Melissa has fled her San Francisco home, an indefinitely postponed wedding and the loss of her job, taking a position as au pair to a Member of Parliament's family. A dreamer, she expects to float into a Merchant Ivory world.Instead, she floats into a continuing series of shocking surprises. She comments on it wisely, wittily and often ruefully, finding the understanding gap between the two countries far greater than she expected.She is amazed that a Member of Parliament should be paid so little, that she, Mummy and the children, share the same bathwater-one at a time, with Melissa last. Treated alternately as a guest (i.e. fellow aristocrat) and as a servant, she finds out about the class system from both sides. Melissa takes us from Granny Aitchee's freezing farmhouse in the hills of Scotland, where she sleeps with her coat on, to the Haig-Ereildoun's faded London townhouse in a fashionable neighborhood.Along the way, she is snubbed as "an American" in the island castle where the Haig-Ereildouns are houseguests, becomes firm friends with Mrs. H-E's aged Nanny, still resident at the country estate of the titled grandparents, and is more or less courted by a quirky English scientist in London.It is an unalloyed privilege to share Melissa's comments -- shrewd, often funny, frequently biting, sometimes almost sad.The au pair year is instructive in more than English upper-class mores and difficult definitions. It gives her a perspective she didn't have, helps her make some important decisions and reveals to her that very few people are either all good or all infuriating. This and much more Melissa has committed to her blue stationery, and we are the fortunate readers-over-her-shoulder, enchanted by this young woman's delightful outlook on our cousins across the sea -- and on ourselves.AUTHORBIO: Marjorie Leet Ford lives in San Francisco. She has worked as a broadcast producer and conceived the long-running national public radio series "Tell Me a Story," traveling around the world to record great writers reading their short stories: Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, John Updike, Alice Walker, and many more.She was also once an au pair in England. This is her first novel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1851294 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Reading Ford's first foray into fiction feels like snooping through a friend's diary, alternately entertaining and ordinary. Set in London and in the coastal Scottish Hebrides, this is a classic fish-out-of-water tale a character is placed in unfamiliar surroundings and left to fend for herself. Suddenly losing her job because of corporate downsizing and deciding as well to postpone her wedding to overprotective artist Tedward, 20-something San Franciscan Melissa optimistically accepts a position as an au pair to an upper-middle-class English family, the Haig-Ereildouns. Mr. H-E is a member of Parliament, and Melissa envisions her six-month stay in the U.K. as a cross between a Mary Poppins adventure and a scene out of a Merchant-Ivory costume drama. Instead, she is greeted by three young terrors and assigned arduous chores s in a London flat with no central heating and prewar plumbing. Mrs. H-E is impossible to please, constantly criticizing Melissa's American English, and she secretly seduces Melissa's friend Simon. Treated as an outcast by the snobbish adults, Melissa is befriended by the family servants, like gossipy English spinster Nanny, and by Trevor, the H-E's nine-year-old son, who is obsessed with death. After an actual death occurs, Melissa acknowledges the personal problems that were the real reasons for her flight from America. Sumptuous details of upper-crust dinner banquets are perhaps the most tantalizing attribute of a bland book that fails to summon the verve that could truly animate the comical aspects of the cultural divide between the U.S. and England.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Reeling from a recent layoff and the possibly permanent postponement of marriage to her longtime love, Melissa takes a position as an au pair to an upper-middle-class English family. It seems like the perfect job. The children are well behaved, the wife sounds charming over the phone, and the husband is a member of Parliament. Melissa's visions of tea, lawn tennis, and elegant parties quickly dissolve upon her arrival in England, when she is handed the tasks of a scullery servant, impossible working hours, children forever on the brink of disaster, and a constant whirlwind of packing and unpacking as the family bounces between their home in London and their crumbling estate in rural Scotland. A faux pas lurks at every turn as Melissa strives to hone her British speech and manners and to overcome the polite but frigid anti-Americanism of the family's friends and relations. In addition to her other tasks, she must teach three-year-old Claire, who is deaf, to speak the Queen's English. Melissa describes all these trials and tribulations with wit and charm in her letters home. This first novel by the author of Cactus: A Prickly Portrait of a Desert Eccentric is delightful indeed; fans of Bridget Jones and the current spate of British TV sitcoms will love it. Highly recommended.DSusan Clifford Braun, Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, CA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This charming first novel is the memoir of a young American woman who went off to Britain for employment as a nanny and got a big lesson in life in the bargain. The Haig-Ereildouns live in London--where Mr. Haig-Ereildoun serves as a member of Parliament and writes novels on the side--as well as a farm in Scotland. Melissa's particular charge is to teach the hearing-impaired child of the family. Mrs. Haig-Ereildoun suggests that Melissa's blood is too thin to deal with the "brisk" Scottish climate, and she asks that Melissa please speak to all the children "as we do," which means, of course, in a British accent. Melissa took this overseas job to put some distance between herself and her boyfriend, but from this new perspective, does he look so bad now? Anyway, British weather is not all that Melissa must acclimatize herself to; and their accent is not all that separates Melissa from the family she works for. But her tenure ends with her knowing that she'll look back and cherish the experience. Brad Hooper
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