The Maid by Nita Prose

 

THE MAID is a book I dithered on buying because I'd heard such mixed reviews about it from my friends. So I was delighted when I found a copy of it in a Little Free Library and ended up "stealth reading" it for my Hype Week challenge, since I remember it was getting a lot of talk time among bloggers when it first came out.

If you've read books like CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHTTIME or WHEN WE WERE VIKINGS, you'll have an idea of what this book is like. It features a neurodivergent character, Molly, a young woman working as a maid in a fancy hotel, who ends up witnessing a murder. Ever since her grandmother died, she's been forced to navigate life and its many confusing social elements all alone. And the fact that she is on the autistic spectrum means that she doesn't always get what's going on around her, or what's being left unsaid, which ends up making her a sort of unreliable narrator in her own story.

I thought this story was fine although the mystery element wasn't quite as compelling as it could have been. It was more fun kind of figuring out what was being said between the lines, but that kind of reduced Molly to a passive vehicle in her own narrative. As with the character in WHEN WE WERE VIKINGS, I felt like Prose also worked too hard to make Molly too twee. I could buy the fact that she valued order, and therefore her work as a hotel maid was totally occupying most of her sphere of interests, but the fact that she was raised by her grandmother ended up making her sound like she was talking like, well, somebody's old grandmother, and it just felt like an awkward way to give her "character."

THE MAID was an interesting story but I also feel like it was a bit bland in some ways too. Reading it also made me kind of sad because of how shittily so many of the characters treated Molly. I do think there's a bit of a humanistic element in it too because some people are also really nice-- CURIOUS INCIDENT was like that too, with many of the characters being pretty patient with the main character, even if he was behaving strangely or having a tantrum. I don't know. This just wasn't what I, personally, am looking for out of most of my thrillers/mysteries. But I passed it along to my mom who loves CURIOUS INCIDENT so much that she went to see the play/musical, so maybe I'll post an update with her thoughts when she reads it, since that was another book I could take or leave.

2.5 to 3 out of 5 stars