It's like Turn of the Screw meets Firestarter as written by Phillip Roth.

What is this book? It is funny without being jokey, all sardonic comment and dry wit, but is top at that. It has the beats of a romance without being a romance, down to the

Spoiler

P.D.Q. Bach

ending. The premise - our protagonist as hired to act as a live-in nanny for kids who catch on fire - is an allegory for...is an allegory for....well, it sounds allegorical. To the point that I assume I'm missing something. But there is too little made of it to be science fiction, too much made of it to be magical realism. It is about having kids, I guess, or at least contains a lot of great lines about what it is like to have kids, but none of the other material.

Our protagonist is the sort of character that I feel deeply with, despite having zero connection to, that sort of put down by life but still riding it out, mired in a quarter-life crisis, in such that books and television suggest that everyone born past around 1967 feels like in perpetuity. Everyone is sort of miserable in a wonderful way, without anything being lyrical about it, which is the source of the humor, but also why a certain class of reader would dismiss this book thoroughly.

The weakness is the paint by numbers plot, not even obvious so much a trudging, but there is at least one scene

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where the protagonist thinks about what sort of conversation that she wished she just had with her mother, but did not

that suggests and intentionality about it.

I think, perhaps, that this is what happens when fluff takes itself seriously. The literary equivalent of a Graham Chapman or Tiny Tim, taking something that is ordinarily light entertainment and holding it so long as to burn. I love it; I am mystified by it.