Book description
"Bad Marie" is the story of Marie, tall, voluptuous, beautiful, thirty years old, and fresh from six years in prison for being an accessory to murder and armed robbery. The only job Marie can get on the outside is as a nanny for her childhood friend Ellen Kendall, an upwardly…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Bad Marie as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Dermansky is a veteran novelist who deserves a wider readership. Bad Marie may be her best book - a darkly funny, oddly affecting tale of a feckless young woman who takes a job as a nanny for a Manhattan power couple, only to abduct the young girl she’s charged with looking after and abscond with her to Paris, the South of France and, finally, Mexico.
Even though Marie is undoubtedly "bad," Kermansky pulls off the impressive feat of making her lovable as she searches for a place in a world that has no use for her.
It is a unique,…
I was working as a nanny in New York City when I discovered this wild novel, and I consumed it in short order. Marie, fresh from prison, is hired out of pity to watch a high school friend’s daughter. “The situation would’ve been humiliating had Marie any ambition in life. Fortunately, Marie was not in any way ambitious.” Marie is instead selfish, culpable, hungry, and smitten—first with her friend’s life, then her friend’s husband, and most dangerously, her friend’s daughter. Dermansky’s novel could easily slip into thriller territory, and while it is as fast-paced and compulsively readable, instead we discover…
From Madeline's list on The best books in protest of women’s “likability”.
If you love Bad Marie...
December on 5C4
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
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