Television producer Jamie Whitfield is a working Park Avenue mother who has to contend with her part-time job at NBS, raising three children under the age of 10, and a workaholic lawyer husband who is so concerned with keeping up with the Joneses that he neglects his family in the process. When her oldest son, Dylan, begins having problems at school and refuses to confide in Jame at the same time that his father isn't around, Jamie decides to hire someone to serve as a positive male role model for Dylan and hopefully provide the outlet he needs to come out of his introverted shell.

Enter Peter Bailey—a college-educated computer science major currently working part-time designing a computer program to help kids

with their homework. Peter comes in and saves the day, helping Jamie to run her household more efficiently, helping Dylan with his self-confidence, and making Jamie feel alive again for the first time in years. At the same time he's picking up the pieces of Jamie's scattered home life, her work life is falling apart. On the verge of breaking one of the biggest political news scandals in the country, Jamie is so focused on the story that she doesn't see the potential pitfalls in the witness's story. Though Peter tries to help her with this as well, he's only one man and Jamie has to figure out for herself what's going to be best for her career...

THE MANNY paints a bleak portrait of the state of marriage in the rich and privileged. Jamie comes from a small Minnesota town and has a problem fitting in with the other Park Avenue wives who have such a sense of entitlement. She spends a lot of time lamenting her place in society, where she doesn't fit in and why—time that could be better spent either doing something about it or accepting it. Her husband, an insufferable lout who cares more what others think about him than what's going on in his own household, is an absolute nightmare and the fact that Jamie spends so much time lamenting the fact that she's been with him for so long when he's so obviously racist, spoiled, and insensitive did more to make me dislike her than to make me hope she'd get herself out of a bad situation. Furthermore, the fact that she strung her handsome, successful, down-to-earth manny along while she figured out what she wanted was unacceptable to me and not the makings of a good romance/chick lit book. There were times when I thought this story was entertaining and amusing, but as a whole it fell short of the mark.

Book Summary

What’s a Park Avenue working mom to do when her troubled son desperately needs a male role model and her husband is a power workaholic? If she’s like the gutsy heroine of Holly Peterson’s astute new comedy of manners among the ill-mannered elite, she does what every other woman on the block does. She hires herself a “manny.”

A solid middle-class girl from Middle America, Jamie Whitfield isn’t “one of them” but she lives in “the Grid,” the wealthiest acre of real estate in Manhattan, where big money and big media collide. And she has most everything they have–a big new apartment, full-time help with her three children, as well as her very own detached Master of the Universe attorney husband. What she doesn’t have, however, is a full-time father figure for their struggling nine-year-old son, Dylan. But the rich haven’t yet encountered a problem they can’t hire someone else to solve.

Enter the manny.

At first the idea of paying a man to provide a role model for Dylan sounds too crazy to be true. But one look at Peter Bailey is enough to convince Jamie that the idea may not be quite so insane after all. Peter is calm, cool, competent, and so charmingly down-to-earth, he’s irresistible. And with the political sex scandal of the decade propelling her career as a news producer into overdrive, and her increasingly erratic husband locked in his study with suspicious files, Jamie is in serious need of some grounding.

Peter reminds her of everything she once was, still misses, and underneath all the high-society glitz, still is. But will the new manny in her life put the ground back beneath her feet, or sweep her off them?