Bad Marie

Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky – 212 pages

“Bad Marie” is the story of Marie, tall, voluptuous, beautiful, thirty years old, and fresh from six years in prison for being an accessory to murder and armed robbery. The only job Marie can get on the outside is as a nanny for her childhood friend Ellen Kendall, an upwardly mobile Manhattan executive whose mother employed Marie’s mother as a housekeeper. After Marie moves in with Ellen, Ellen’s angelic baby Caitlin, and Ellen’s husband, a very attractive French novelist named Benoit Doniel, things get complicated, and almost before she knows what she’s doing, Marie has absconded to Paris with both Caitlin and Benoit Doniel. On the run and out of her depth, Marie will travel to distant shores and experience the highs and lows of foreign culture, lawless living, and motherhood as she figures out how to be an adult; how deeply she can love; and what it truly means to be “bad.”

This in an enticing little book that has you cheering for the main character although she is oh so bad. It was an elicit pleasure to be in a protagonist’s head who really doesn’t give a hoot about her actions and how such actions affects those around her. This author has masterfully created a character who does things any woman, let alone a wife and mother, would hate, yet for some reason, I was cheering her along. Not a word is wasted in this novel and the author ended this book as it should.