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Reviewed by:
  • Must Love Black
  • Karen Coats
McClymer, Kelly; Must Love Black. Simon Pulse, 2008; [176p] Paper ed. ISBN 978-1-4169-4903-9 $8.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 6–9

Desperate to get away from her perky new stepmother, Philippa answers an ad for a nanny, intrigued by the qualification “must love black.” Philippa does indeed love black, and has ever since her mother was killed in a car accident when she was nine. She arrives at the spooky, isolated mansion near Bar Harbor, Maine, to find that her charges have also lost their mother, but that their somber approach to life most likely predates that tragedy, as their names are Triste and Rienne, which her high school French tells her mean “sad” and “nothing,” respectively. Still, the girls are nice enough, and the gardener hot enough, for her to want to stay and even to do some good by trying to get the overworked father to notice his children again. So, we have a broody Gothic setting complete with rumored ghosts, Addams Family–like spawn, a distracted father, a sinister matron named Lady Buena Verde who seems bent on keeping the father from his children, a cute and possibly mysterious [End Page 86] gardener, and a newly arrived child-minder with a Gothic-sounding name. We also have excerpts from a Gothic novel that Philippa’s mother wrote before she died that Philippa uses for life lessons. Unfortunately, these details don’t coalesce into a stylistic or thematic whole, even as parody; rather they bounce around between The Turn of the Screw, a Harlequin romance, The Secret Garden, and Mary Poppins, and ultimately become a frothy light read where the nanny reunites the father with his children and finds that her crush on the gardener is mutual, though nothing actually happens other than his promise to visit her after the summer. Loose ends are left to dangle, potential goes unrealized, and black becomes decidedly pale blush. That said, the nanny romance angle will make it enjoyable fare for candy Goths whose outlooks are not as dark as their nail polish might suggest.

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