This book made me ask myself if I’d ever see a book that is so aggressively marketed to be THE hot new book of the Summer that promises to be a combination of some of your favorite books and not have high hopes for it. I was very determined to stay neutral on this book when I went in and not let the expectations that I had for it ruin my enjoyment of it.
So when I say that it’s really too bad that I didn’t like this book, I mean it. I was honestly very disappointed with it, and even more disappointed with the concept that it will definitely be popular enough that I won’t get to forget about it existing anytime soon. I have a feeling that this book was destined to be sold in airport bookstores because it’s just quickly-paced enough to be a vacation read. It doesn’t go much beyond that, I don’t think that it needs to, but it was still a let down to have anticipated reading it (based on the summary alone).
⚡️ I was provided with an audio-ARC by the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
This post also includes an affiliate link to purchase this book.
The Maidens
by Alex Michaelides
🌟: 2 / 5
📚: Therapist and recent widow Mariana’s life couldn’t get any more out of her control, until she receives a call from her niece that her friend has been murdered, and she thinks she knows who did it.
💭: Usually when I go to write a book review, I have a single post-it of mid-read thoughts to consider, instead of just my post-read reaction. I had so many thoughts reading this book that I ran out of post-it space and wrote a full essay instead.
I have never read Michaelides’s first book, The Silent Patient, but the aggressive marketing for his new book (this one) based around its success kept popping up for me, I just said why not, right? I love Greek myth inspired dark academia, let’s go, right?
I knew this book would rub me the wrong way when I realized that much of the murder-mystery plot line in this book is built around the scientific misconception that you can pinpoint time of death to be within minutes (this actually happens more than once in the story and is used to really narrow in on a suspect, at which point, I almost DNFed). From there, the mystery falls to the wayside because the main character, Mariana, spirals into a very Nabokov-esque obsession with trying to find another character guilty.
Usually in a murder-mystery, you can expect there to be a red herring, but you can figure it out from clues and hindsight once you know who really did it. This is absolutely not the case in this book. At all. While this book definitely sets the blinders towards the object of Mariana’s obsession as the red herring, there’s an entire quartet of characters with the exact same backstory elements and unhinged moments who seemingly exist solely as suspiciously flat Maybes. Although the whole book felt riddled with plot holes, the final redirect and reveal is so hastily tacked on at the end, complete with a villain speech, that I was certain I had book-whiplash.
I feel like this book exists very much to be a somewhat forgettable vacation thriller for women in their 30’s, especially considering that there’s an entire plot detour that serves exclusively as an ad break for Michaelides’s first book. Following that bit, I definitely began to notice more and more elements that annoyed me while reading it, including, but not limited to things like an adult woman being able to slip an entire postcard into her jeans pocket. Parts like this make it abundantly clear that it was from the point of view of a woman who was written by a man.
I don’t know if it was the marketing for this book or my own expectations that did me in, but I just did not like this book. I went in expecting a combination of Sharp Objects and The Secret History, and it is that, but mainly the parts that I found most frustrating between the two. It’s very much a book that was written to fulfill a marketing pitch, it does it of course, but it falls prey to it too.