Book Review: "The Au Pair" by Emma Rous

I remember when I was at work a few years back and I was in the midst of reading a book called “Luckiest Girl Alive” and I was really enjoying it. A woman, my coworker whom I will not name, came up to me and said that because I had studied literature and film for so long that I should be reading something more literary and classic and sophisticated than a chick-flick thriller. I am not going to lie to you, I felt kind of bad for reading it then. But after a while I realised something. As I have been studying literature and film for so long, I can pretty much read what I feel like and if I want to read, as she put it, a ‘chick-flick thriller’ then I am going to read a ‘chick-flick thriller’. Why? Well, because I felt like it. Do not ever let anyone make you feel bad about what you are reading. Reading should be for enjoyment not for the sake of making yourself look smarter than everyone else. And honestly, they are pretty good books - flicking from one perspective to another from one time to the next, revealing secrets and keeping you gripped unit the end. I don’t remember the last time Don Quixote did that since I read it when I was fifteen. Other times? Not so much.

“The Au Pair” by Emma Rous is about a set of twins - their names are Daniel and Seraphine. Their father has just died and they are sorting through some things. They remember and mourn also, the time their mother died on the day they were born after throwing herself from the cliffs behind the family home. After a while of sorting, they find a picture of the family together: their mother on the day they were born only a few hours before she died, looking happy - their father, their older brother and only one baby. There was only one baby in the picture which now sparks a question of who that baby was and who was taking the picture. The au pair that their older brother had when he was a toddler fled the day the twins were born, and there are whispers in the village of a someone who took a child, stole them and never brought them back. Through lies, entanglement and false narratives, this book even goes to the brink of murder as twins try to find out who they really are and what really happened that fateful day to their late mother.

An often bleak and sickening story, this book is a twisted case of nobody wanting to talk about anything and a bunch of hearsay. Things go from bad to worse until the very finale of the book which seems to burst out of the hints and clues left behind from the rest. The seeming ‘curse’ on the family is rife with ‘mights’ and ‘maybes’ and when the twins discover that there were once other people in their family that they never even knew about, things got even worse from then on. It is written in alternating narratives between 1991/1992 and 2017 and covers the narratives of Seraphine in the later years and Laura in the earlier ones. I think that this book takes the term ‘imposter syndrome’ really to the very edge and tries to find out what may happen if you really did not think that you were your parent’s child. It is amazingly written with twists and turns that you will never see coming even though the seeds were planted all along.