Two and a half stars, but more like two stars. I first read this when I was too young to understand it fully. That's clear to me now that I'm reading it as an adult. I'm delighted I found it again. I really remembered very little of it except for two major plot points. Enid is a fourteen-year-old with a criminal lawyer father and a radiologist mother. They hired an honestly really incompetent, wacky housekeeper-nanny. She's clearly supposed to be comic relief. It wasn't funny at all. The parents are typical out of touch, super rich ones, but done to parody levels. Lowry was probably going for "so focused and successful at their careers that they don't know their own daughter," but instead wrote characters that had me asking, "If you're this inattentive and scatterbrained, how have you kept your licenses to practice law and medicine this whole time? Your careers should be in shambles!"

Enid is super sarcastic, and sometimes this made me laugh. She doesn't like her name and picks a new one. So does the little boy she's babysitting, and this is where the book's title comes from. I thought that was kind of clever. Lowry wrote an incredibly true to life character in the horrid Wilma Sandroff--there's parents like that everywhere, who act that way, and for some bizarre reason, they often become family and child therapists. Their kids really do hate them and have active plans to flee. I didn't like Seth. I kept reading because the narrative voice was so engaging, and I wanted to learn if the scene I liked so much as a kid would still resonate with me as an adult. It didn't. I finished the book and neatened some of my apartment, trying to figure my thoughts. This was clearly intended as popcorn reading, even for kids. It was supposed to be warm and fuzzy. Instead, marginalized groups and different events are treated very lightly. Mostly, I feel apathy. I wanted this to be different than it turned out. ( )

I read this at the same time that I read Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey and Father's Arcane Daughter by E.L. Konigsburg. They are all about an outsider coming into a family and making changes for the good: in other words, they are a subset of Elijah stories about families. This story is a bit pat---breaking the rules works here and and people may not be as poor as they seem.

Most of the action is in Boston's Public Garden; the swan boats play an important part. Enid, who would prefer to be known as Cynthia, babysits for a four-year-old boy whose mother is overly protective. They break her rules, have good adventures, learn something about the homeless (if you treat people as if they don't matter then these people come to believe they don't and vice versa).

SPOILER: The one thing that was, unfortunately, absolutely true to life was that when the police come across 20 bag ladies, two teenagers, a four-year-old, and a Black man all doing something illegal, the only one they handcuff is the Black man, who like Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is a Harvard professor. ( )