Publishers Weekly
01/25/2021
Rodman debuts with an engrossing memoir that focuses on her relationship with serial killer Tony Costa (aka the Cape Cod Cannibal). As children in the late 1960s, Rodman and her little sister spent summers in Provincetown, Mass., where her mother worked at a motel. A promiscuous alcoholic, the mother would fob her two children off on any willing adult so she could bar hop. One of them was handyman Tony, whom Rodman remembers as a kind man who would take Rodman and her sister along with him on errands he was doing around the Cape. In 1969, the police arrested Costa; he was convicted of two murders and sentenced to life in prison, where he killed himself in 1974. Only in 2005, when Rodman confronted her mother about what happened to Costa, did she learn to her shock that he was a drug-addled pervert and serial killer who dismembered his female victims and buried them in the woods. The authors smoothly blend Rodman’s affecting account of her childhood with thorough research into Costa’s crimes. This tragic tale of a dysfunctional family and a psychopath is a page-turner. Agent: Jill Kneerim, Kneerim & Williams. (Mar.)
The Bookreporter
"Fascinating...captivating...gripping, tense, harrowing, and balanced....The authors move it beyond mere entertainment and toward a challenging exploration of family and dysfunction. In the end, this is a story of Liza Rodman’s survival and strength."
Shondaland
"An emotional tour-de-force...heart-pounding, gut-wrenching...will thrill True Crime and memoir fams alike."
Carolyn Murnick
"Like a real-life horror movie, The Babysitter is a harrowing account of the evil that can lurk around the edges of girlhood."
Sarah Weinman
"I was utterly captivated by The Babysitter, a hybrid memoir & true crime investigation of the heinous crimes of a Cape Cod serial killer who also happened to be the only adult young Liza Rodman felt safe with. Rodman and Jordan's book skillfully weaves a suspenseful portrayal of murderous madness in tandem with a child's growing loneliness, neglect, and despair, a narrative collision that will haunt me, and readers, for years."
Shelf Awareness
"Haunting...chilling...This enthralling memoir deftly intertwines the stormy childhood of one of the authors and the life and brutal acts of the serial killer who often watched over her."
The Provincetown Independent
"Eerily compelling."
Winnipeg Free Press
"The Babysitter vividly describes how brokenness begets brokenness, how the lives of girls and women are inherently perilous, and how dangerous it can be to presume that children’s capacity for resilience is limitless."
Helen Fremont
"The Babysitter is a gripping read that’s impossible to put down: a string of gristly murders, a cast of charismatic, often abusive, and occasionally pathological characters, a comically incompetent police force, and an astute child’s perspective on the adults in her life. More profoundly, it raises questions about how children manage to adapt and survive in a world in which love, attention, and violence are inextricably intertwined."
Booklist
"The intimate details and easy-to-read style will keep readers glued to the page."
The Independent
"Continues a tradition started by Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me...and is a compelling, sensitive hybrid of memoir and true crime...straightforward, unwavering in its clarity."
Amy Butcher
"Brilliantly researched and hauntingly rendered, The Babysitter is a deeply inquisitive examination of what it means to live and grow on the outside of violence, of danger. As generous as it is chilling, this impressive and startling narrative orbits the realms of meditation, fact, and memory."
Newsweek
"For your true-crime devouring best friend who's listened to every My Favorite Murder episode."
Kirkus Reviews
2021-01-13
A true-crime “hybrid work of memoir and narrative nonfiction.”
With journalist Jordan, Rodman recalls her preteen summers on Cape Cod with a younger sister and a mother “so self-absorbed that she unwittingly left her children in the care of a psychopath.” For a book about vulnerable children—a topic that usually tugs the heartstrings—the narrative is not as affecting as one would expect. One strand tells the story of Antone “Tony” Costa, a handyman “who just about everybody considered the friendly, even charming guy next door”—until he was convicted of the murders of Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki and believed to have killed at least three other women. A second strand involves Rodman’s painful relationship with her distracted mother, who worked as a tourist-season motel housekeeper and often let Costa take her daughters for drives—including to a forest where he had buried his victims—when the author was between the ages of 8 and 10. The two threads alternate in a briskly written text that isn’t for the faint of heart: Costa committed gruesome dismemberments and other sadistic acts about which the adult Rodman has understandably had nightmares. Yet the story is curiously lacking in drama, in part because the book doesn’t reveal the author to have been in serious danger of harm from Costa. In the absence of high suspense, the authors try to pump up the tension with pulpy clichés (“his blood went cold”), stilted dialogue (“That kid is trouble….Mark my words”), and a deceptive-appearances theme familiar to the genre. The most noteworthy material appears in an epilogue, where, after excellent detective work, Jordan and Rodman establish conclusively that Costa did notkill three women he was suspected of murdering—a payoff that for followers of the case may be worth the 300-page wait.
A grisly but low-impact tale of horrific crimes and their impact on the author.