All Her Fault

A theme that runs through many of the interpersonal dynamics in the novel is how class divisions impact relationships. The most literal example of this divide is found in the hierarchy between the parents and their nannies, but these class divisions also color the public’s response to Milo’s kidnapping and Carrie’s decision to take extreme measures outside “legal channels” to get her son back.

When Milo first goes missing, the police begin their investigation by questioning the Irvines and the Kennedys about their nannies. It quickly becomes clear that neither set of parents knows much about the lives of their staff. Peter and Marissa, for example, are not even entirely sure of their nanny Ana’s address. In contrast, the nannies, Ana and Carrie, know intimate details of their employers’ lives: Their routines, their preferences, and, of course, their children. The dynamics between the wealthy employers and their working-class staff reveal how the wealthier characters often fail to notice and treat working-class persons as individuals instead of just a means to their own ends, like childcare. Such class divides permeate the community as a whole: As Carrie notes, at the school, “the parents talk to the other parents” while the “childminders” tend to talk only with each other (115). This lack of understanding of the lives of the people who work for them briefly hinders the investigation.

Due to the extreme wealth of the Irvine family, the public response to Milo’s disappearance is harsh. It is colored by the Irish experience of the “Celtic Tiger” when financial speculators became incredibly wealthy, and the subsequent financial crash in 2008 left many impoverished. As one comment notes, “Nobody with that much money gets it legally […] they made money out of poor schmucks during the boom and left them for dust when the economy collapsed” (182). They suspect the Irvines of wanting to profit from the disappearance of their son with “a book deal” (183), even though it is Irene, who grew up working-class and feels she needs the money, who most actively seeks to profit from the tragic situation by selling her story to the tabloids and pursuing public attention.



Although Irene eventually comes into middle-class stability when she marries Frank Turner, her daughter Carrie’s life is defined by struggle and turbulence. When Carrie was young, her father, a career criminal, abandoned them while they lived in public housing. Carrie struggled to find stability in her life as an adult, especially following the tragic accident that left her in a coma for weeks and resulted in the kidnapping of her infant son, whom she believed she had accidentally killed. She is a “runaway, an outsider who was brought up to believe the system lets you down” (373). She does not have the means to pursue justice when she learns her son has been kidnapped by the wealthy, privileged Irvines. Thus, she feels she has no recourse but to hatch the scheme to get close to the Irvines by posing as a nanny and kidnapping Milo.

In a wealthy place like Kerryglen, class divides are thus a key element that shapes the way people interact with each other and understand the world, revealing how wealth inequality can impact people both in their private lives and in the way society treats them.