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.
A romantic comedy with a delightfully biting literary edge, it's the story of Melissa, a sharp eyed American abroad. Fired by her San Francisco ad agency, she cancels her wedding to Ted, the safest man I've ever met, and soon regrets her next impulsive move across the Atlantic, as au pair to a minorly aristocratic British family, with the mother from hell, an ineffectual, sweet natured father, and three children, one of them deaf. From freezing farmhouses and island castles in Scotland, to a faded house at a smart London address, Melissa observes the natives in their classic habitats, with their bizarre manners and unchanging habits like the Romans, whom they take after, the people of these islands have fixed axles their ingenuity and mean ways, their utterly disarming moments and surprisingly gorgeous, death defying food. she resists the effete charm of the British bourgeoisies but succombs to the lure of lemon shortbread, and the sexy appeal of a lean and hungry Englishman, a far cry from the solid but absent Ted.
An enchanting, hilarious, idiosyncratic novel by the author of Diary of an American Au Pair, set in San Francisco’s Moscow Hill district -- it’s Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, with dogs.
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.
After losing her advertising job in San Francisco and canceling her wedding (though not her engagement) an unencumbered Melissa, who harbors grand illusions about life in England, heads off to a new job as au pair to the family of a Member of Parliament. But the minorly aristocratic Haig-Ereildouns’ household falls far short of Melissa’s imaginings. Mrs. Haig-Ereildoun refers to Melissa as "her American girl" with a mixture of pride and contempt, expects her to share the children’s bathwater and, most importantly, entreats Melissa to " try to speak as we do." Heaven forbid the children pick up an American accent! But then there is Nanny, the gloriously eccentric octogenarian who raised Mrs. H-E, who offers comfort, and much comic relief; nine-year-old Trevor, Melissa’s charge, whose wisdom and companionship redeem many a lonely day; and her budding friendship with a mysterious Englishman who is miles from her fiancé in every way. Melissa converses with Scotish fishermen, breakfasts with a French Minister of Culture, frequents island castles and sixteenth century manor houses, all the while straddling her ill-defined role (somewhere between houseguest and servant) with humor and grace. Melissa’s immersion in this unforgettable world teaches her more than she could possibly have imagined not only about the culture she has come to inhabit but, most importantly, about herself.
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