The book starts off with the death of a boy, then goes on to describe the stories of six women leading up to this event. Essentially it's a 'who done it' mystery but you can work out who the murderer is earlier on. I had a good interest in this story but the author overly describes the character stories so it feels quite a long book to get through, especially as there is little excitement or drama along the way. If you have an interest in France and the au pair experience, then this is the book for you.

I was excited about the premise of this book and the first few pages had me hooked, but the remaining 98% was just.. fine. The back story of each character was detail-rich. I kept waiting for these heavy descriptions to have any relevance to the main plot, but few of them were, and when the ‘mystery’ was concluded, I was underwhelmed. Even though nothing was outright ~*bad*~ as such, it’s hard to find much passion for a group of wholly unlikeable characters.

The Caretakers is a brilliantly written book about life as an au pair, the dynamics of family and responsibility in family, with a hint of mystery thrown in.

It opens with the death of nine year old Julien and the arresting of his au pair Alena but the book then comes back and we read six stories about the weeks leading up to the death from six different women, three Au Pairs, the French teacher, the mother and the teenage sister. The mystery definitely comes second to the exploring of these characters and we get so much depth and back story. The author explores life in a different country, the language barrier, many different family dynamics, blame and responsibility and I was gripped from the first page.

This was a fantastic read and I will definiyely keep an eye out for whatever she writes next.

What a lovely written debut novel. I loved the style of writing, with in depth background on the characters & intermingling stories of four American au pairs and the host families in Paris, and the mystery behind the death of one the children. Couldn’t put it down. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Told through the eyes of six different women, this book is centred around a tragedy that strikes a Parisian home when a young boy is under the care of an au pair. As each narrative reveals a little more about the events leading to the child's death, we also explore class, identity, language and family roles. Some of the characters are hard to relate to (and a couple are downright frustrating), but there's enough of a narrative arc to keep things moving forward and you do ultimately understand each person's motivation, however odd their actions may occasionally seem. It is one of those books where you feel like if everyone just told the truth about how they were feeling, things would be resolved much faster - but then, isn't that a bit like real life? It's really well written and thoughtfully paced, and the sense of place is really strong.

In the well-to-do Parisian suburb of Maisons-Larue, shortly after the 2015 terrorist attacks, Alena, an au pair is arrested after the sudden and suspicious death of nine-year-old Julie, as the result of a fall. The truth behind what happened is described through six women: Geraldine, a heartbroken French teacher who struggles to connect with her vulnerable students; Lou, an incompetent au pair fired by the family next door; Charlotte, a chilly socialite and reluctant mother; Holly, a nervous au pair who yearns to feel at home in Paris; Nathalie, an isolated French teenager desperate for her mother’s attention; and finally, Alena, the au pair accused of killing Julien.

What follows is the six weeks leading up to Julien's death. It's an introspective and claustrophobic debut that focuses on the dysfunctional womens' lives and where they collide. I enjoyed the descriptions of Paris and it was useful hearing from the au pairs and their hosts, who weren't likeable (to me at least). I found chapters long, where I would have liked it to be more pacy and involving; there is suspense but not enough for me. I liked this but didn't love it, but thank you for the opportunity to read and review it.

An intriguing book set in Paris featuring au pairs, host families, complex kids and a tragedy…..all different perspectives tell the story. I really enjoyed it!

Alright, I am going to say this: Americans should stop using non-American settings when it adds nothing to the plot. I am aware that this author in particular has lived in France for four years, but you honestly couldn’t tell by reading her book.
Moreover, I found the constant mentions of the terrorist attacks very superficial and poorly done. If you are not going to have a conversation about it, why bother adding it to the book? I swear, it was completely useless and it read like the author was there during that period of time and felt the need to make the reader know that. It was pointless.
Pointless. I feel like this word encompasses the whole book: everything was pointless and it was one of the most anticlimatic thrillers I’ve ever read. I wouldn’t even classify this as a thriller (nor a mystery, to be honest); it’s a contemporary literary fiction with a mysterious death which is not mysterious at all and the neverending chapters were completely useless. I had already guessed who had killed the boy from like page three and the chapters did not contain any hint nor foreshadowing to the fact itself.
The characters were flat, to say the least. It’s not enough to make them super flawed to have good thriller characters, in my opinion. They have to be three-dimensional and flawed, to be interesting and to make the reader interested. I was not invested in the story and I think the book would have been better if it simply were a “dark” contemporary about au pairs, France, language barriers, or whatever the author wanted to talk about.
The plot, as I said, was not engaging and most of the POVs were not functional to the story. It became extremely repetitive extremely quickly, not to say boring. I would have liked the book more, probably, if it were written from just one or two POVs, maybe Alena’s and Charlotte’s, which I feel are the most relevant characters. I can even say three POVs, adding Nathalie’s to the mix, but that’s it. Lou’s, Holly’s and Géraldine’s are pretty useless and the plot could have worked out without them.
To add to the general boredom, the chapters were extremely long for no reason. The style felt dragging; I generally enjoy an aseptic writing style in thrillers, because they make the book, indeed, more thrilling to me. In this case, it just made the characters even flatter and the story even less interesting, as far as I am concerned.
In general, I tend to always find someone to recommend books to, even when I give them one star like in this instance. This time, however, I cannot begin to think about a pontential reader. It has a lot of 5 stars ratings on Goodreads, to be fair, but the average rating is 3.68 as this very moment, so I don’t know. I guess it will depend on how the audience will receive the book once it’s published in April, since before pub date the ratings are always tilted, one way or the other, especially as there are reviews from people who know the author.

I found this book really hard to get into but once i'd got the stride i could not put it down.
highly recommend.

This was okay but I found it hard going so many characters to keep up with. I did carry on until the end but it was heavy going.

I finished this one a few days ago and I'm still not quite sure about how I felt...I quite enjoyed it but I was also an au pair a few times so I quite liked how relatable if felt, the cultural differences, the types of families you encounter on a program like that, the experience of living abroad and how important it is to make friends, especially those going through the same things.

I liked that it it was divided into different chapters about each of the main characters, but when it got towards the end and we learnt about Alena's background, it felt like it was a little late, like the story should've been coming together by then rather than us discovering all these new things, I didn't dislike the way it was laid out, I actually thought maybe I was just used to a different way of writing, it just felt a little bit like daunting that the ending was still not quite there.

Editing-wise, there were a couple of bits missing around this Alena chapter as well. Maybe a few words, sentences, paragraphs...I'm not sure what but there were definitely two skips.

Overall, a fine debut with an interest storyline.

For me, this book was good - but not great. Honestly, I struggled through to the end of it and generally found it slightly boring. It felt over-long and many of the characters felt a little pointless to me. I'm a big fan of both Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You and Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies - both quoted in the blurb as "for fans of" - and this just doesn't have a patch on them. Sorry.

Paris in the spring of 2016 and tensions run high as armed riot soldiers patro; the streets.
A young boy dies and his au pair is accused of murder.
This strange cast of characters all have secrets and reasons to lie to the police.
The tension mounts as spring turns to summer and the heat intensifies.
A stunning complex story of clahing cultures and class.

This book left me with more questions than answers. It felt quite bitty and introduced characters who then didn't feel finished and their story was left dangling. I read to the end as I wanted to see what happened but not sure I enjoyed it exactly.

The story of being an au pair and it not being want it's advertised to be is not a surprise but it did feel as if the caricature of how the French behave was very much in play and sometimes uncomfortably so.

I loved the premise of this book and although it was less of a ‘whodunnit’ and more about the the lives of the various characters in the affluent suburb of Paris, it was the richer for it. All the characters were relatable and well drawn. I was transported and thought and felt a great deal for each of the main players.

I shall definitely look out for more from this author and am very grateful to NetGalley and Little Brown Book Group for this much appreciated ARC in return for an honest review.

‘The Caretakers’ is a ‘whodunit’ exploring the intricacies of the relationship between class, nationality and care-giving in a wealthy suburb of Paris in 2015. Specifically, it deals with the before, during and after of the death of a young boy whilst in the care of his au pair.

I was keen to read this novel for nostalgic reasons, having myself worked as an au pair in Paris in 2007-2008. The cover of the book is beautiful and takes me straight back to the balcony of the apartment that I was fortunate enough to live in.

The novel opens with a quotation about love from one of my all-time favourite books, Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. Despite this, it is mostly jealousy and hatred which abound in ‘The Caretakers’.

The opening scene of the story itself, when Charlotte Chauvet finds her youngest son dead, is punchy and gripping. It struck me how strongly the passage implied that Charlotte was undeserving of any sympathy despite the incredibly tragic circumstances. I felt nothing at all for this grieving mother.

This lack of empathy for the novel’s characters continued throughout even after two of them found themselves caught up in the Bataclan shootings. I never managed to work out the relevance to the overall tale of the repeated mentions of the Paris and Brussels terror attacks of that time.

Overall there are more than twenty characters in this novel, six of whom are protagonists. I found almost all of them unlikeable, including the au pairs. Each character’s back story is recounted in painstaking detail and out of chronological order, including those of the minor characters. Although, somehow, I managed not to get lost or confused by all the time-hopping, I felt a lack of editorial pruning of the background information killed the pace of the novel and led the main mystery of Julien’s death to get totally lost amongst all of the irrelevant details. I felt that the final 100 pages of the novel dragged. I am glad I persisted with them so that I got to read the only part of the novel which moved me, the tale of Alena and the snow globe. However, the resolution of the novel’s central mystery felt like an anticlimax when it finally arrived. I also didn’t feel that the character of Lou deserved her sugary-sweet reunion, which to me felt tacked on to the end of the story as a last-ditch attempt to inject a tiny bit of hope into an otherwise very depressing tale.

Bestor-Siegal makes some very astute remarks in ‘The Caretakers’ about love, loss and anxiety which have gone straight into my collection of favourite quotations.

It is very clear that the author lived in France for a few years. She has perfectly captured many elements of the culture of wealthy Parisian suburbia and the ex-pat au pair community. To some extent I got the dose of Paris nostalgia I was looking for, though I am very grateful that my own experience as an au pair was nowhere near as terrible as those of the novel’s protagonists. In fact, it was one of the best years of my life.

Readers looking for a tale filled with family drama, tragedy and teenage angst will enjoy this novel but I don’t think it will appeal to fans of pacy and exciting murder mysteries.

Thank you to the author and publisher for my Netgalley ARC.

Set in Paris we meet a number of wealthy women and their child minders, some of them young Americans. Most of the characters are hard to get to know. The children have their own problems, mothers have affairs.
However when one child dies the story becomes a more disturbing read. This is an excellent first novel that creates the Parisian suburbs really well. You feel the confusion of the children and also the emotional distance of the fathers. We get to know six of the women very well. You may not like them all but they are fascinating.
The book is brilliantly designed to keep us involved right to the end.

Set in a world I know nothing about - that of young overseas au pairs looking after children in a wealthy French suburb - Amanda Bestor-Siegel’s debut novel is billed as a mystery, but its particular strength is as a compelling character study of six very different women, all of whom feel so real in all their flaws and complexities that you somehow end up rooting for all of them when tragedy strikes. The six interwoven narratives complement each other perfectly, adding extra layers of detail and shifting your sympathies as the full picture of “whodunnit”, and what actually happened, emerges. Bestor-Siegel did some au pairing herself, and the little details - of parties on the banks of the Seine, fresh baguettes and the terror of Bataclan and Brussels - ring with truth.

I loved this book, I finished it in one day. The younger characters are relatable, and it brings me back to when I was that age and wanting to get out and see the world.
My one criticism is that there are probably too many characters to adequately care about all of them. Lou is very unlikeable and never really redeems herself, and and I don't think we learn enough from Charlotte's POV about her motivations. If we scrapped Lou and Charlotte as protagonists, there'd be more room for Nathalie to cover Charlotte's back story, and Lou wouldn't really be missed IMHO.

Overall though, great book.

"The Caretakers" by Amanda Bestor-Siegal refers to the au-pairs who look after the children of suburban Parisian families. It revolves around the death of Julien, the child that Alena is hired to look after, is she guilty? Just how did they get into this situation? We see related events from the perspectives of other au-pairs, a French language teacher, the mother and sister of the family affected, and also their back stories too. Definitely relatable to anyone who has spent a year abroad, trying to make friends. A good read.