Rowan's nannying is colored from the start by the possibility of surveillance, and it is with a 'strange performative feeling' that she plants kisses on heads and cuts up bananas, never knowing if her employers might be looking in. We don't know what happened, except that something went very wrong, something to do with 'all the sleepless nights and the loneliness and the isolation and the craziness of the house and the cameras and everything else.' We know that a child is dead, and that Rowan says she didn't kill her.īook Reviews 'Dark, Dark' Doings In A Slick Debut Thriller We know that Rowan is writing from prison. Ware creates suspense with sinister precision. Rowan Caine accepts a nannying job at a gorgeous house in the Scottish Highlands, wired with a smart home app called, horribly, 'Happy,' that lets its owners surveil every room in the house from afar, control the lights, heat, and locks - and even talk through speakers in the walls. With The Turn of the Key, Ruth Ware ( The Woman in Cabin 10) offers a clever and elegant update to James's story, one with less ambiguity but its own eerie potency.

By the end, a child is dead, but we still don't know: Were the ghosts real, or were they in the governess's head? Over time, she becomes convinced the children are communing with the ghosts of former servants, who appear to them, at first at a distance and then ever closer, threatening to lead them to damnation. In Henry James's ambiguous, paranoid novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), a governess is left in charge of two children in an isolated Essex country house.

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The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware