Elle's Reviews > The Maid

Now a Goodreads Choice Nominee in Mystery & Thriller and Debut Novel 🤨

Mmmmmm yeah, no. This was not good. I did not enjoy it at all, and I recommend it to nobody. Okay that’s the review, bye!!!!!



Lol yeah, maybe one day I’ll be the person who can just rate and move on but today is not that day! And I am not that guy.

As of now, I can see I am in the minority opinion. It wasn’t far into The Maid before I realized this wasn’t going to be a positive experience for me. But I’d like to give a shout out to Jan B’s review for bringing up a lot of things I was thinking while reading, and to Chelsea who lets me complain to her uninhibited. As a BOTM pick, a book slated for adaptation and an author who is a publishing executive, this one’s gonna have a lot of eyes on it, and I want to make sure there are perspectives present beyond the flurry of glowing reviews.

The premise of The Maid is such: a hotel maid who is “different” from other people discovers the dead body of one of the hotel’s wealthiest patrons, foul play suspected. She gets further dragged into the fray and unintentionally incriminates herself, all while misreading what should be “obvious” social cues. There’s murder, money, drugs, off-page violence and ~mystery~ all wrapped in something meant to be somewhere between a cozy mystery and a genre thriller.

The plot itself is fine, though nothing we haven’t seen before. Instead, what’s carrying the story is the titular Molly the Maid, set up as a lovable underdog that just gets in over her head. She works hard! She is a good person! She tries her best! And she LOOOOOVES to clean!!!!!!! Clearly this is meant to be cute and charming.

But Molly is also written as neurodivergent in some never-specified way. I’ve seen a couple of weird arguments by people saying the author has not confirmed this, but she doesn’t have to. I read it; the writing is not exactly subtle. And I did not love the way she was depicted at all, to be totally honest. I can only guess that Nita Prose was trying to capitalize on that ‘quirky female main character who whoopsie-daisies her way into some trouble’ trend from like 5ish years ago. And frankly, she missed the boat. This isn’t a fresh, compelling character idea—and in the case of The Maid, it wasn’t even well done.

Listen, I understand the intent behind a character like this. I’m not saying it’s necessarily offensive, but it sure as hell isn’t cute. And the idea of a gaggle of privileged, upper-middle class book club women reading and gigging at a character like Molly being framed for murder because she ‘doesn’t understand how people work’ makes me feel kind of weird. Molly appears as a caricature, dreamed up by someone who’s only exposure to ND people has been Rain Man and Eleanor Oliphant.

As others have noted, Molly’s qualities aren’t very consistent. They wax and wane depending on the need of the story. She doesn’t understand what a rumba is or can’t tell if someone is smiling or not, but then is effectively spouting off complex behavioral analysis a few chapters later. The situations she finds herself in are beyond ludicrous, and the way she inevitably gets out of them even more ridiculous. And Molly isn’t the exception to bad characterizations. Every single other person, from the villain(s), to the fumbling police, to the rest of the hotel staff—are all cartoonishly portrayed.

There’s probably more subtext I’m missing, with the two additional POC maids and the undocumented kitchen employee (I’m sorry, where is this supposed to take place again? The UK?? Is there a large number of undocumented Mexican immigrants working at British hotels that I’m unaware of???). Because this book isn’t about the challenges of operating in a neurotypical world or the difficulties of navigating a new country while undocumented, but instead those are just secondary stumbling blocks on the road to figure out who murdered this rich white guy. And I don’t feel as though Molly and Juan Manuel were treated with care, but instead a kind of passive cruelty.

That said, the biggest offense for me though? This was boring as hell. I couldn’t read more than a dozen or so pages at a time, despite how short it was. I have genuinely no idea how or who chooses which mystery/thrillers to acquire, let alone adapt, but they need to have the company checkbook taken away immediately. Anything present in the story that was out of the ordinary was equal parts absurd and dumb, and anything remotely passable has been done a thousand times already. Seriously someone, anyone, clue me in to what was so compelling about this meditation on why ‘ummm service workers actually LOVE cleaning and waiting on our every whim?!’ with a side helping of murder. I’m literally begging you.

I’ll refrain from ending spoilers even though I don’t think it’s worth reading, but that big ‘twist’ was so obvious while also being completely unnecessary. It cheapened every bit of plot up to that point, though by then it was mostly a lost cause for me.

one additional note: (view spoiler)[WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT ASSISTED SUICIDE ““TWIST””?!? EXCUSE ME. (hide spoiler)]

Anyways, someone please call Florence Pugh’s agent and have her pull out of this ASAP. I’m having war flashbacks of Maddie Ziegler and Kate Hudson in Sia’s MUSIC. 😐



*Thanks to Random House - Ballantine for the advance review copy!

**For more book talk & reviews, follow me on Instagram at @elle_mentbooks!