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Best Fiction of the Decade: Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky (2010)
A series of posts on my most unforgettable, must-read books of the past decade.
I can’t resist a good end-of-decade list, especially when it involves books. This decade was full of great reads and in this series of posts, I thought I would revisit some of my favorites published during the past 10 years.
With a title like Bad Marie, you might have guessed that this chick Marie is a bit of a hot mess.
And you would be quite correct. In the span of 212 pages and — what, a month’s time? — Marie manages to get herself into more situations of a criminal nature than one would think would be humanly possible. (Which is probably not much of a surprise, given that Marie is newly-sprung from prison after serving six years as an accomplice in a failed bank robbery.)
When we first meet Marie, she’s 30 years old, just out of prison, working as a nanny for her childhood friend’s daughter … and in a drunken sleep in her friend Ellen’s bathtub, with the 2 year-old she is responsible for splashing blissfully away in the same tub. That sets in motion the chain of events that is this novel, beginning with Marie’s manipulations and machinations to snare Ellen’s husband for herself.
