Cash Cow by Nina McGrath **
A free Kindle book that I read back in August.
If not for Australian place names mentioned, I would have taken for granted it was American, as (to me) it has a definite ring of “Hollywood housewives”. The main character, however, is a young woman struggling to keep ends meet, and desperate to get a job to keep an aggressive debt collector at bay. She is offered a job working as a nanny for a wealthy Sydney couple, the Kings. She soon finds out that she is not the only nanny, but one of three, paid to look after … I think it was four kids. Always at least one nanny on duty, around the clock. Simone does get rather attached to the children along the way; but her employers, the parents, turn out to be a real handful - and the working conditions highly questionable. It’s also a mystery how exactly the Kings are able to keep up the affluent lifestyle that they do.
All in all a “light read”; and the outcome kind of predictable, even if some twists and turns along the way contribute to making one keep on reading. Sometimes I felt nearly as frustrated with Simone and her fellow nannies as with their employers. But at the same time, I guess the story does reflect some of the traps one may easily fall into when young and inexperienced, and desperate to get one’s first job and earn some cash.
I might recommend it to someone thinking of going abroad to work as “au pair”…
