The Importance of Being Kennedy

October 15, 2007
Graham moves her focus from the U.K. royals she portrayed in Gone with the Windsors
to America’s royal family in this imaginative fictionalization of the Kennedy clan’s evolution between the world wars. The story is told from the perspective of Nora Brennan, an Irish immigrant nanny who watched over the Kennedy kids beginning in 1917. Though Nora adores each child, she grows especially fond of Rosie Kennedy, whose learning disability makes her the runt of the overachieving litter. Throughout her years of service, Nora discovers that beneath Mrs. K’s prim and proper exterior is a “heart as hard as the hob of hell,” only outdone by Mr. K’s unrelenting pressure on his sons to succeed at any cost. Meanwhile, Graham guides readers through the family scandals, political triumphs and petty squabbles that lead up to WWII, which will change the lives of the Kennedy family and their faithful nursemaid forever. Though it’s billed as a “bittersweet comedy,” the Kennedys are easier to pity than to laugh at, and their lives are marred by tragedies that Nora suggests Joe Kennedy brought on himself. The family gets a very sympathetic if sometimes soft-focused treatment that should find a readership among those who came of age in the era of Camelot.