Lullaby

By Leïla Slimani.

⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

‘You shouldn’t try to understand everything. Children are just like adults. There’s nothing to understand.”

What if you knew who committed the crime from the very first page, but spent the entire book desperately trying to understand why?

Lullaby begins by telling us exactly what has happened. There is no mystery surrounding who is responsible for the horrifying deaths of Myriam and Paul's children. Instead, Leïla Slimani takes us backwards, asking a far more disturbing question: how did this family reach that moment?

When Myriam decides to return to her career as a lawyer, she and Paul hire Louise to care for Mila and Adam. At first, Louise appears to be everything they could possibly want. She's wonderful with the children, keeps their Paris flat immaculate, cooks, cleans and gradually makes herself indispensable to the entire family.

That growing dependency was one of the most fascinating parts for me. Louise doesn't simply work for the family. She slowly becomes woven into the mechanics of their lives until it's difficult to imagine how they would function without her. Even when uncomfortable moments begin creeping into their relationship, dismissing Louise would mean dismantling the comfortable routine they've built around her.

Knowing the outcome from the opening pages completely changes the reading experience. Every seemingly insignificant interaction carries an underlying threat because you're constantly searching for signs of what is coming. I found that incredibly effective. There are no dramatic clues announcing that something terrible is approaching, just an increasingly claustrophobic feeling that the boundaries between employee, caregiver and family member are becoming dangerously blurred.

Louise herself is unsettling precisely because Slimani never reduces her to an easily explained monster. Glimpses of her past, her loneliness and her increasingly strange behaviour provide pieces of the picture without ever offering a neat explanation. At times I sympathised with her circumstances, while at others her behaviour made me deeply uncomfortable.

I also really enjoyed the wider commentary running beneath the story. Class, motherhood, childcare, privilege and the complicated relationship between employing someone to perform domestic labour while simultaneously treating them as "part of the family" all add another dimension. Myriam's desire to reclaim a professional identity is particularly interesting alongside the growing reliance on another woman to make that possible.

The writing creates an intensely intimate atmosphere. Told through shifting perspectives, we're allowed into the private frustrations and insecurities of several characters, gradually seeing tensions that nobody else fully recognises. There are moments that feel almost suffocating, particularly as Louise's carefully maintained image begins to fracture.

I was very aware that I was reading a translation, however. For the most part, the prose works beautifully, but I did question how differently certain passages might read in the original French.

Unfortunately, the ending significantly affected my final feelings about the book.

After spending the entire story knowing what happened and desperately trying to understand why, I expected considerably more closure. Instead, it ends with ambiguity still surrounding Louise's motivations and several questions unresolved. I understand the decision not to provide one convenient psychological explanation for something so horrific, and arguably that uncertainty makes the events even more disturbing, but personally I wanted something more concrete after such an intense build-up.

For most of Lullaby, I thought I was heading towards a much higher rating. The opening is unforgettable, the psychological tension is brilliantly maintained and the relationship between Louise and the family becomes increasingly uncomfortable to witness. The lack of resolution ultimately prevented it from reaching that level for me, but the journey towards an ending we already know is still incredibly compelling.

A deeply unsettling examination of dependency, motherhood, class and the danger hidden within seemingly ordinary domestic life.

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