Television producer Jamie Whitfield is a working Park Avenue
mother who has
to contend with her part-time job at NBS, raising three
children under the age
of 10, and a workaholic lawyer husband who is so concerned
with keeping up
with the Joneses that he neglects his family in the process.
When her oldest
son, Dylan, begins having problems at school and refuses to
confide in Jame
at the same time that his father isn't around, Jamie decides
to hire someone
to serve as a positive male role model for Dylan and
hopefully provide the
outlet he needs to come out of his introverted shell.
Enter Peter Bailey—a college-educated computer science major
currently
working part-time designing a computer program to help kids
with their
homework. Peter comes in and saves the day, helping Jamie to
run her
household more efficiently, helping Dylan with his
self-confidence, and
making Jamie feel alive again for the first time in years.
At the same time he's
picking up the pieces of Jamie's scattered home life, her
work life is falling
apart. On the verge of breaking one of the biggest political
news scandals in
the country, Jamie is so focused on the story that she
doesn't see the
potential pitfalls in the witness's story. Though Peter
tries to help her with
this as well, he's only one man and Jamie has to figure out
for herself what's
going to be best for her career...
THE MANNY paints a bleak portrait of the state of marriage
in the rich and
privileged. Jamie comes from a small Minnesota town and has
a problem
fitting in with the other Park Avenue wives who have such a
sense of
entitlement. She spends a lot of time lamenting her place in
society, where
she doesn't fit in and why—time that could be better spent
either doing
something about it or accepting it. Her husband, an
insufferable lout who
cares more what others think about him than what's going on
in his own
household, is an absolute nightmare and the fact that Jamie
spends so much
time lamenting the fact that she's been with him for so long
when he's so
obviously racist, spoiled, and insensitive did more to make
me dislike her
than to make me hope she'd get herself out of a bad
situation. Furthermore,
the fact that she strung her handsome, successful,
down-to-earth manny
along while she figured out what she wanted was unacceptable
to me and not
the makings of a good romance/chick lit book. There were
times when I
thought this story was entertaining and amusing, but as a
whole it fell short
of the mark.
What’s a Park Avenue working mom to do when her troubled son
desperately needs a male role model and her husband is a
power workaholic? If she’s like the gutsy heroine of Holly
Peterson’s astute new comedy of manners among the
ill-mannered elite, she does what every other woman on the
block does. She hires herself a “manny.”
A solid
middle-class girl from Middle America, Jamie Whitfield isn’t
“one of them” but she lives in “the Grid,” the wealthiest
acre of real estate in Manhattan, where big money and big
media collide. And she has most everything they have–a big
new apartment, full-time help with her three children, as
well as her very own detached Master of the Universe
attorney husband. What she doesn’t have, however, is a
full-time father figure for their struggling nine-year-old
son, Dylan. But the rich haven’t yet encountered a problem
they can’t hire someone else to solve.
Enter the
manny.
At first the idea of paying a man to provide a
role model for Dylan sounds too crazy to be true. But one
look at Peter Bailey is enough to convince Jamie that the
idea may not be quite so insane after all. Peter is calm,
cool, competent, and so charmingly down-to-earth, he’s
irresistible. And with the political sex scandal of the
decade propelling her career as a news producer into
overdrive, and her increasingly erratic husband locked in
his study with suspicious files, Jamie is in serious need of
some grounding.
Peter reminds her of everything she
once was, still misses, and underneath all the high-society
glitz, still is. But will the new manny in her life put the
ground back beneath her feet, or sweep her off them?
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