I read this in three days. First, this isn't the type of novel I usually pick up. I don't want to read about someone's everyday life and everyday ordinary troubles. I need one or a combination of the following: murder, car chases, space chases, aliens, dragons, wizards, planets blowing up, end of the world infectious diseases, etc. Having said that, I found myself intrigued with a world completely foreign to ME.

Kate is ambitious, but she has a child and someone needs to take care of him. She enjoyed six months at home with him, but finds herself bored and ready to return to work. Zora answers her ad to "Substitute Me" and become the baby's nanny.

From the very beginning I had trouble liking Kate. She professes to love her child, but she never sees him. Kate works from 8am to 9 or 10pm every night and even works on some weekends. She is NEVER home. She convinces herself it is all for the "good" of her family. It comes down to priorities and balance. Kate's priority is getting a promotion. There is no balance.

On the other hand I liked Zora almost from the beginning. I could relate to her better as a stay at home mom who loves to cook. She has trouble admitting to herself that she enjoys being a nanny. She's good at it, really good, but she never tells her own parents that she has taken this job. Zora fears their disappointed in her as an educated black women who has chosen to revert to slavery by working for a white woman. However, Zora works and searches for what she really wants to do with her life.

I enjoyed the book, and I was satisfied with the ending. In an effort not to spoil the ending, I'm not going to tell you why I liked the ending. Just know that for me, that's how I wanted it to end. For me, the best part of the book was the last 140 pages or so. I LOVED the drama in those pages! ( )

I read this in three days. First, this isn't the type of novel I usually pick up. I don't want to read about someone's everyday life and everyday ordinary troubles. I need one or a combination of the following: murder, car chases, space chases, aliens, dragons, wizards, planets blowing up, end of the world infectious diseases, etc. Having said that, I found myself intrigued with a world completely foreign to ME.

Kate is ambitious, but she has a child and someone needs to take care of him. She enjoyed six months at home with him, but finds herself bored and ready to return to work. Zora answers her ad to "Substitute Me" and become the baby's nanny.

From the very beginning I had trouble liking Kate. She professes to love her child, but she never sees him. Kate works from 8am to 9 or 10pm every night and even works on some weekends. She is NEVER home. She convinces herself it is all for the "good" of her family. It comes down to priorities and balance. Kate's priority is getting a promotion. There is no balance.

On the other hand I liked Zora almost from the beginning. I could relate to her better as a stay at home mom who loves to cook. She has trouble admitting to herself that she enjoys being a nanny. She's good at it, really good, but she never tells her own parents that she has taken this job. Zora fears their disappointed in her as an educated black women who has chosen to revert to slavery by working for a white woman. However, Zora works and searches for what she really wants to do with her life.

I enjoyed the book, and I was satisfied with the ending. In an effort not to spoil the ending, I'm not going to tell you why I liked the ending. Just know that for me, that's how I wanted it to end. For me, the best part of the book was the last 140 pages or so. I LOVED the drama in those pages! ( )

I really enjoyed this book. I had a few qualms with some predictable (and cliche) turns in the plot. Yet, I think the gravity of the issues that many women and families face today (juggling work, relationships, and domestic chores) really overshadow those qualms. It would be a great novel to use for a book club - so many areas to discuss (racial and identity issues, gender issues, and concerns about the modern two-income familial situation). All in all, I highly recommend this book to folks who enjoy modern general fiction!

This is a smart, thoughtful story about a young prosperous white couple, Kate and Brad Carter, who hire a nanny who is black, Zora Anderson, to take care of their six-month-old son Oliver, or “Ollie.” Zora responded to an ad which read:

"Wanted: Substitute Me. Looking for a nanny who will take care of my six-month-old baby as if he were her own. Five full days a week. No cooking or cleaning required. Must love children and be prepared to show it. References required.”

The job, however, is a difficult one for Zora to take for several reasons. Her parents, high achievers who live in Ann Arbor, had high expectations for their children. Zora’s brother is a successful corporate lawyer. But Zora (named for author Zora Neale Hurston) is a college dropout who hasn’t yet found her passion. She knows she likes to cook, and she likes to travel. She loves kids. And she needs money. She knows that “If her parents knew what she was about to do, they would completely disown her, probably change the locks on the doors and spit on all of her photographs.”

There is also the issue of a black woman working as a domestic for a white family. As Zora mused, "A thousand slave women were probably rolling in their graves as they watched her get ready to go back to the big house.”

Chapters alternate between the points of view of Kate and Zora. Kate - career-driven - loved her time home with Ollie after he was born, but now is anxious to get back to adult interaction and go as far as she can in the corporate world. Brad is a stockbroker, but, as Kate tells Zora, “he’s secretly one of those bleeding-heart guys who wants to be doing something meaningful, like building windmills in China or running some nonprofit organization that lets him travel to Africa to help save all the poor starving orphans.”

At first, Brad ignores Zora – Kate attributes it to Brad’s “misplaced White man’s guilt” for having a black nanny. She encourages him to get to know Zora, which happens naturally as Kate stays later and later at the office to impress her boss. Soon, Brad, Zora and Ollie start seeming more like a family unit than Brad, Kate and Ollie. Zora finds she can talk to Brad about her angst over her position: "My parents are going to be so happy to hear that my grandmother and I have the same job, cleaning up after White people and raising their children.”

And Brad feels more comfortable telling Zora about his dreams for a different job than he feels telling Kate, since Kate values making money over “adolescent” preoccupations with non-lucrative passions.

The two get closer, until the inevitable happens, and Zora truly becomes a “substitute me” in every sense. But what makes this story unique is the way the author has the three characters handle the situation. A number of explosive issues, simmering in the background, now come to the fore, including race, class, the expected roles of husbands and wives, and the conflicts experienced by working mothers. A conversation between Kate and her mother summarizes some of these:

"‘I never in a million years thought Brad would do this to me,’ Kate said. ‘and what makes it so awful is that he fell for … this Black girl who’s not even attractive, no college degree, whose greatest accomplishment is that she cooks well. How does he go from me to her? What is that about? Why did I work so hard to maintain this body? Have a career? Plan a future…’ Kate’s voice broke. She had to take a deep breath before she could finish her sentence. ‘…if all he wanted was a maid and a cook?’

‘I say he was just thinking with his you-know-what,’ her mother said, pursing her lips as if she’d swallowed something sour. ‘Those colored girls are quick to jump into bed with anyone.’

‘So I’ve been told,’ Kate mumbled.”

Similarly, Kate’s friends try to assure her this is just a “jungle-fever thing.”

Evaluation: This book and its realistically nuanced characters grew on me as I kept reading, and even after I finished, because there is much to ponder. The issues it explores about what men and women want out of a relationship are so relevant to today’s women. And yet the addition of race and class lends complexity and interest that take the story to a higher level. And as the author suggested in an interview in which she compared her book to The Help, “Just because the year is 1999 and not 1959 doesn't mean that the tinderbox of racial tensions doesn't exist between employer and employee, and I try to show that in my story.”

The author, Lori Tharps is the author of two critically acclaimed non-fiction books, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America and Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain. Her first novel not only tells a very good story, but gives you a great deal to think about: it’s ideal for a book club selection. In fact, I tend to agree with author Carleen Brice who wrote that there is so much to talk about, you might want to schedule two book club meetings to discuss it all! ( )

Kate is about to return to her high powered ad-exec job after a six month maternity leave for her newborn son, Oliver. Though she's a very caring and devoted mother, Kate feels a void in her life that can only be filled by resuming her career. When she discovers the perfect nanny named Zora, things seem to be looking up for her. Zora is a godsend to Kate. A thirty year old woman who has had a vast amount of experience with children, Zora is having difficulty deciding what she wants to do with her life. While Kate rushes off to her job, Zora begins to fall in love with little Oliver and starts to do more and more around the house to make up for Kate's absence. But being an African-American nanny working for a white employer seems to make Zora and Kate's husband Brad very uncomfortable. Zora is keeping her position with the Kate and Brad a secret from her family, who would be appalled that she has taken a job as a servant to a white couple, but she can't deny that she finds the job fulfilling. Meanwhile, Zora and Kate form a bond that Kate would like to see stretch further, and Zora begins also to cook and feed the family, becoming, in effect, the perfect nanny and substitute for Kate. When Kate takes on a few extra jobs at the office, Zora is left playing a major role at the house and soon finds that her job is putting her in a very bad position with certain members of the family. This leads to an explosive and shocking series of events that neither the married twosome nor Zora saw coming. Both timely and eye-opening, Substitute Me tells a story of two women who want to have it all and the consequences that having it all can manifest.

I wasn't sure I was going to like this book, and like a lot of the books I have been reading in the past few months, it took me a little time to warm up to both the story and the characters. There are a lot of books now that have sort of burst out of the mold of chick-lit and into more of the area of women's fiction, and I felt this book straddled both of these genres. I guess I consider chick-lit a more fluffy variety of women's fiction that stays away from more serious issues, whereas women's fiction tends to be more relevant and tackles the more serious sides of life. Substitute Me was somewhere in-between, and though it started off with a very chick-lit feel, it ended up morphing into a more serious and thought-provoking piece of fiction.

This book was essentially the story of two very different women and was told in alternating chapters from both viewpoints. Kate, the career woman who wants it all, seems to have only slight difficulty handing the reins of her household to another woman. She deliberates with herself about this for maybe two seconds and decides that she would rather further herself in the business world than stay at home raising her son. It's made clear to the reader very early on that this is not a situation that has to do with money. Kate and Brad could still live extravagantly without Kate's income but Kate feels like there's something tangible she will be sacrificing by not returning to her career. I didn't necessarily feel that Kate was being selfish, but it would be easy to get that impression in light of the fact that she continues to climb the corporate ladder as ferociously as she can and grants Zora more and more power in her household.

Zora, on the other hand, is conflicted about the type of life she wants to lead. Her parents have made it very clear that her options should be limited to prosperous and high profile jobs, which bothers Zora, whose real passion is to become a personal chef. Zora looks at her time with Oliver as a stepping stone and has no plans to remain in the world of nannydom. But she is filled with indecision and vacillates between being satisfied with her current situation and wanting to follow her dreams. The real problem isn't what Zora thinks about her situation, it's what everyone else thinks of her situation. The people she has been open with about her current employment sneer at her for her role as a nanny, pressuring her in subtle ways to leave this glorified serfdom behind and get on to better things. Her parents simply don't know about her job because Zora refuses to tell them.

There is a lot made about the racial divide between whites and blacks and the positions they hold in one another's lives and in society. It seems to be a problem that most of the nannies in New York are black and it causes a lot of tension in the storyline. I honestly never thought about it before because I don't tend to stereotype people by their skin color, but in this book it's exceedingly bad to be a black woman working as a nanny for a white family. I can see that this issue is one that I probably don't understand as well as I think I do and I'm sure that there are a lot of things I haven't considered about these types of arrangements, but I'm not so sure that these issues are all that important. The only thing that should be important is the quality of care that the nanny gives and the respect that is due to her for this care. But generalizations are made and stereotyping and mild prejudice pop their ugly heads up, and the issue of color is one that takes on great importance in the tale.

There are parts of this book I won't discuss because I think it's better to discover them for yourself. What I will say is at times this book could be a little cliché and preachy. I felt that the same issues were tackled over-abundantly and sometimes to the point of annoyance. I liked the book, I really did, but I felt that some things should have been left on the back burner once being thoroughly discussed. Other than that small niggle, the book was solidly written and I liked that there was gravity to what I initially thought was a light story. I found the characters to be three dimensional and lifelike, and the dialogue was also rather believable.

I think this would be a great book for book clubs because there's a lot here to discuss, and I think it would be interesting to get other people's opinions on the idea of working mothers. I also think the book has a lot to say about racial stereotyping and the perceived inequalities that exist between whites and blacks, and though it does push it's messages rather hard, I do have to admit they are interesting and affecting messages. I ended up being very pleased with this book, and despite some minor problems I had with the way the story was told, I did really enjoy it overall. I would be interested in seeing what others think of it as well, so if you have read this book or are planning on it, drop me a line! ( )