The Ruining

Starred review from December 1, 2012
A compelling psychological thriller presents a vulnerable girl on the brink of madness. This intriguing take on the classic story "The Yellow Wallpaper," finds Annie, a refugee from poverty in Detroit, moving to a mansion in San Francisco to become the nanny for a wealthy couple's 3-year-old girl, Zoe. The couple pays Annie's tuition at San Francisco State University and promises her a measure of freedom to study and have a social life. Almost immediately, however, Libby, Zoe's beautiful mom, takes over Annie's life, giving her clothing, choosing her university classes and deluging her with advice. Annie idolizes Libby, but she finds her increasingly hard to please. Libby finds fault with minor things, becoming especially unhappy when Annie begins a romance with Owen, the handsome, smart and super-nice guy next door. She demands most of her time, takes the door off Annie's room and begins to install hideous yellow wallpaper there. As time passes, Libby becomes ever more hostile, accusing Annie of things the girl has no memory of doing and causing Annie enormous anxiety. Collomore supplies enough clues for astute readers to guess what's going on, but she builds the suspense from Annie's viewpoint until readers will be flipping through the pages till they run up against the too-neat resolution. Up until then, however, this story unwinds as a corker of a read with an unreliable, or perhaps not, narrator. Gripping stuff. (Suspense. 12 & up)

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April 1, 2013

Gr 8 Up-Libby Cohen, the gorgeous young mother of an infant and a toddler, opens her palatial Belvedere Island, San Francisco home to a downtrodden nanny from the mean streets of Detroit, giving her employment and the chance to attend college. Annie is still torn by guilt over the drowning death of her little sister some years prior. It doesn't take long to see that the naive and impressionable girl is completely outclassed by her employer, a master manipulator. What motivates Libby to draw Annie in like a sort of sister one moment and then to nag, judge, and abuse her the next? Whether Libby is just plain evil or is calculating a way to use Annie to further her own ends becomes lost as Annie attends fewer classes at the university and discovers a secret that savvy readers may have quickly suspected: Libby is not the first Mrs. Cohen. Loss of privacy and choice soon put Annie at Libby's mercy, especially once Libby has engineered a break-up of the whirlwind relationship between the nanny and practically perfect Owen next door. Sinister yellow wallpaper, mind games, and even Valium all bring Annie to the brink of, well, ruin. The book meanders too long and strains credulity and logic in spots, but it does manage to play on readers' fears for the character and instill a dark sense of claustrophobia.-Suzanne Gordon, Lanier High School, Sugar Hill, GA

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