Enter Randi Gill, sent by Family Options, Ltd., an agency specializing in Midwestern girls with teaching aspirations ("Could you be Comfortable with Anything but the Best for Your Family?. . . Guaranteed Nationwide FBI Criminal Fingerprinting and Background Checks."). Randi's references are perfect. She's perfect. She cleans, cooks, sews, and makes her own Play-Doh. The children love her . . . almost too much.
Though it's hard for Mirella to watch Randi succeed with the children where she has failed, she can't deny the peace and order Randi has brought to the household. But perfection is a tough act to maintain, and soon enough, there are ruptures. When events force Mirella and Howard to reveal the secrets they've been hiding from each other, the family cataclysm catapults the nanny (who has secrets of her own) into a position of unnatural control.
In A Perfect Arrangement, Suzanne Berne now fixes her sights on contemporary, two-career family life. Overscheduled and overwhelmed, today's parents are desperate for help. Whatever child care they manage to set up, the arrangements are rarely perfect. This suspenseful novel asks a question all of them face: "Is there anyone you can trust with your children?"
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To up the ante, Berne has installed her domestic ménage in a charming New England town, where main street is populated by quaint shops, and unsightly necessities (such as, say, the grocery store) are relegated to the hinterlands. Inhabiting the equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting, each character is further pressed to idealize the notion of family; each has a distinctive mental image of what a home should look like. Anger and frustration and failure are suppressed until they surface in horrible, comic eruptions. Thus do Berne's characters ultimately learn to appreciate the "terrible, desirable, exhausting plenitude" of life. Admirers of Joanna Trollope's domestic dramas--by turns witty and harrowing--should find much to love in A Perfect Arrangement. --Claire Dederer
"Suzanne Berne has many gifts, among them the talent to describe with eloquence and empathy the fault line of her characters. There's an exotic beauty in Berne's natural world as well. In A Perfect Arrangement everyday life outdoors for the Cook - Goldmans is illuminated with the clarity and color of a Maxfield Parrish illustration. Inside the house, Berne's beloved and flawed people struggle to make their way in love and work in the all too modern world." (Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World and Disobedience)
"Who is 'authorized' to love us, to love our children, our work - finally, who deserves to share the bounty of our lives? Suzanne Berne examines many kinds of possession, parental, erotic, economic, even environmental, and dramatizes these very challenging questions with dead-on aim and just what A Crime in the Neighborhood led us to expect: a scrupulous, unsentimental sympathy beautifully served by the precision of her prose." (Rosellen Brown, author of Half a Heart and Before and After)
Praise for A Crime in the Neighborhood
"A remarkable first novel that captures the history of child-parent relations in the last quarter-century, from the adults' betrayal to the new generation's revenge." (The New York Times Book Review)
"A Crime in the Neighborhood resonates with those fragile necessities of life, keenly aware of the scent of newly mowed lawns and the dangers that might land on any one of them." (The Boston Globe)
"In this novel, Berne's first, the telling is an exciting and elegant as the story being told." (USA Today)
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