The Nanny Diaries Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin Penguin, 320pp, £6.99 ISBN 014100892X

Memorable first lines are all well and good, but for a truly tantalising beginning, a disclaimer is hard to beat. This bright, breezy first "novel" opens with an elegantly worded assurance that all its names and characters spring from the writers' imaginations; reader, this is "a work of fiction". And yet it is no coincidence that the co-authors Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, like their long-suffering heroine, paid their way through school by working as nannies for New York's super-rich elite, clocking up eight years with more than 30 families between them. Ultimately, so much of what fills the pages of this highly entertaining debut seems just too bizarre to have been made up.

The Nanny Diaries chronicles a turbulent year in the life of Nan, a 21-year-old student. Ambling through Central Park one golden autumn day, she is assailed by a large, old-fashioned wooden hoop with a small boy in hot pursuit. When the boy's mother strolls over, Nan chances to mention that she is searching for part-time work as a nanny, and the deal is as good as done: Nan has become Nanny, hired by Mr and Mrs X of 721 Park Avenue to care for Grayer, their four-year-old son.

Park Avenue parenting is an unnerving mix of the over- weening and the criminally neglectful: it's flash cards in the womb and Suzuki tapes in the bath, but it goes without saying that mother-and-child events are for nanny and child. In the Xs' home, Nan finds an entire spare bedroom (one of many) filled with books on raising children, from The Zen of Walking to How to Package Your Child: the preschool interview, yet Mrs X mercilessly deploys the "spatula" movement the moment her son gets within hugging distance. Mr X, meanwhile, is noticeable only for his absence; it is two full months before Nan even glimpses him, and his son, well on the way to a lifetime in therapy, refuses to leave home without Daddy's grubby, disintegrating business card pinned to his belt.

There is nothing stealthy about the Xs' wealth, and jewellery upon jewellery is just the tip of a diamond-encrusted iceberg. In their friends' $20m apartments, where palatial kitchens could happily house entire families, long strips of duct tape mark out the battle lines between warring couples, and living rooms are decorated in "faux Louis XIV meets Jackie Collins" style.

Nan's role in all this alternates between "middle management and cleaning staff", and Mrs X delivers her orders in notes; a typical one might include instructions to steam beets, kale and kohlrabi for Grayer's tea (peanut butter and jelly are contraband).

For her part, Nan's every utterance is punctuated by an upbeat exclamation mark: her job, she knows, is to sell Mrs X on her own child, and her razor-sharp ripostes are strictly asides.

But if the Xs are everymen in this childcare drama, Nan is exceptional; most nannies, she notes, are "Irish, Jamaican or Filipina", middle-aged women with families back home halfway across the world, while others travel in from the Bronx, leaving their own children with neighbours.

So long as chick lit teeters on, the chances are that any young-girl-in-the-city novel will be squeezed into its stays, but beneath the pithy, label-laden prose of The Nanny Diaries lie some subversive aspirations. For starters, Nan's neuroses and relationship problems are entirely work related, with boys pushed firmly on to the back-burner; Nan may leap to the phone at the sound of her beloved's voice, but sitting waiting for it to ring is definitely not her style. Moreover, once Nan has ensnared her "Harvard Hottie" from up on the 11th floor, he is sidelined to cheerleader status, there to provide her with microwave suppers and long-distance career advice. In many ways, the real love interest is Grayer, Nan's chubby charge who starts out a psychopath and ends a lovable but increasingly disturbed toddler.

The Nanny Diaries has been published simultaneously in the US and the UK. On the jacket of both editions, a lone female figure floats across the New York skyline, beneath a very familiar-looking brolly. Inevitably, Mary Poppins breezes in on page three, but she hovers over the ending, too. As Nan reflects: "Looking back, it was a set-up to begin with. They want you. You want the job. But to do it well is to lose it."

Kraus and McLaughlin are a fresh, tart voice, but I wonder whether we in Britain are not too inured to the idea of handing over our newborns to appreciate fully their weird and wacky insights.

Hephzibah Anderson works on the books desk of the Daily Mail

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