Do Try to Speak as We Do
The Diary of an American Au Pair
-
-
1.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
It seems like the perfect job: an upper middle class English family desperately needs a nanny. The father is an aspiring novelist, the children are well-heeled, and the mother's accent radiates with charm over the transatlantic phone. So young Melissa jumps at the chance to travel overseas and live an aristocratic life of tea and crumpets. But her romantic notions are shattered when she becomes an unwitting target of the family's genteel snobbery, icy wrath, and ridiculous misunderstandings. Melissa's letters home cast a sharp eye and quick wit on the family's bizarre cast of friends and relatives, but she eventually learns that a little bit of understanding and tolerance can go a long way - and can even teach her more about herself - in Do Try to Speak as We Do by Marjorie Leet Ford.
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.
Customer Reviews
Have a root canal instead
It would cost more than this book but be more enjoyable. The books premise, an American au pair in the UK, is interesting, and the anticipated cultural and linguistic challenges are set up, but the title of the book is as good as it gets. The main character is pathetically, perhaps clinically wimpy and apathetic. Actually had to just quit halfway through when the main character's best friend threw up her hands in despair and walked away, I did too.