THE MAID, a lightly-sweetened lemonade of a book...refreshing!

THE MAID
NITA PROSE
Ballantine Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

NOW $2.99 ON KINDLE (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Molly Gray is not like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and misreads the intentions of others. Her gran used to interpret the world for her, codifying it into simple rules that Molly could live by.

Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has been navigating life’s complexities all by herself. No matter—she throws herself with gusto into her work as a hotel maid. Her unique character, along with her obsessive love of cleaning and proper etiquette, make her an ideal fit for the job. She delights in donning her crisp uniform each morning, stocking her cart with miniature soaps and bottles, and returning guest rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel to a state of perfection.

But Molly’s orderly life is upended the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself dead in his bed. Before she knows what’s happening, Molly’s unusual demeanor has the police targeting her as their lead suspect. She quickly finds herself caught in a web of deception, one she has no idea how to untangle. Fortunately for Molly, friends she never knew she had unite with her in a search for clues to what really happened to Mr. Black—but will they be able to find the real killer before it’s too late?

A Clue-like, locked-room mystery and a heartwarming journey of the spirit, The Maid explores what it means to be the same as everyone else and yet entirely different—and reveals that all mysteries can be solved through connection to the human heart.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is a locked-room mystery, narrated by a naïve narrator who genuinely, unfeignedly does not understand what is happening or why it unfolds the way it does. Its bones, then, are excellent. A well-trodden path is a gift and a curse for writer and reader. What makes or breaks the reading experience is the voice the author tells the story in.

Having edited books for a living, Author Prose is very much aware of this reality. It makes her achievement in creating Molly the Maid, ironically surnamed "Gray", contextually appropriate but nonetheless impressive. Molly loves her world, the job of being a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel.

There’s nothing quite like a perfectly stocked maid’s trolley early in the morning. It is, in my humble opinion, a cornucopia of bounty and beauty. The crisp little packages of delicately wrapped soaps that smell of orange blossom, the tiny Crabtree & Evelyn shampoo bottles, the squat tissue boxes, the toilet-paper rolls wrapped in hygienic film, the bleached white towels in three sizes—bath, hand, and washcloth—and the stacks of doilies for the tea-and-coffee service tray. And last but not least, the cleaning kit, which includes a feather duster, lemon furniture polish, lightly scented antiseptic garbage bags, as well as an impressive array of solvents and disinfectants, all lined up and ready to combat any stain, be it coffee rings, vomit—or even blood. A well-stocked housekeeping trolly is a portable sanitation miracle; it is a clean machine on wheels. And as I said, it is beautiful.

There is nothing about a housekeeping trolley that has ever creased my cranium before now. I'll never be so blind again. It's a rolling chemistry experiment, though I don't see that with Molly's appreciative eyes.

What strikes the neurotypical reader is how very clearly Molly isn't One of Us. She has her meltdowns, logically enough, when overwhelmed by the chaos of Life (which of necessity includes death); we'd do the same if Chaos obtruded on our day the way it did Molly's as she discovers the lifeless body of repeat hotel guest Mr. Black. The fact is, Black is well named. His death wasn't an accident or an illness...he was Murdered and the police, unfamiliar with Molly's, um, state of being, rapidly assign her the role of Suspect.

And then the Universe springs into action.

Molly, you see, is a gem. She's being used by some bad people whose moral compasses aren't calibrated right, she's being set up to take a fall she can't even see, and she is...crucially...possessed of seriously good luck in her friends. There is no question that she is the proof one always wishes for that there are some Forrest-Gumpian stories that aren't cloying. However, I will not lie to you: anyone...and I mean ANYone...who says "we are all the same in different ways" to me is going to get a truly Tongan response.... Still there is a beauty in the repetition and reassembly of cliché in service of a Message. Well, when that Message is a positive and a constructive one, which is what this fun read exemplifies to the point of being the illustration in the dictionary under "message fiction." It is, though, this Message-y nature that leaves a fifth star off my rating. I could hang with the repetitive reminders of Molly's neurodivergence. I was not quite so willing to overlook the "different ≠ bad" catechism, or the "pretty ≠ good" catechism. Learning to see beyond surfaces? Yes, yes, a maid whose oft-repeated mantra is to "return your suite to a state of perfection" is the perfect messenger for it, got it, stop now. But there was no Stop button....

What happens as a result, though, is the unraveling of a long and ugly strand of American society, a series of horrible crimes that are so...repellent...to persons and so easy to distract institutions from pursuing, that it really isn't on for me to go into it. I will say that there's not one miscreant who gets through this wringer unsqueezed. That's enough about the crime parts. The resolution parts are shaped to suit Molly the Maid's comprehension level, which expands exponentially as she navigates the shoals of her grieving for her Gran's death, for her sad coming-to-awareness of the venality of people, and her sudden awakening to the fragility of Truth and Innocence in a world that needs answers instead of solutions.

Molly and Gran used to watch Columbo reruns together, so Molly's primed for a policing style that doesn't exist in reality when she's enmeshed in a dreadful web of lies and betrayals in her safe place, The Regency Grand Hotel. She's arrested for a crime she knows she didn't commit, and her tormentors aren't even slightly interested in her life-long passion for truthfulness. The issue is, of course, that even her truthfulness is weaponized against her by the miscreants using her innocence to cover their crimes. But, crucially, Gran's long shadow nurtured relationships that Molly, all unknowing, can depend on for her very life. Right there in the hotel! And she surprises herself by being able to reach back to the hands held out to her. Though there is a serious difficulty in that she doesn't immediately see them as helping hands.

Seeing is a recurring theme for Molly. Her being seen, being acknowledged, is a huge issue in her life...people don't see maids, and even her co-workers don't as a rule see Molly. The names of the characters are almost all colors or qualities of sight...Stark, Rosso, Green among others...and Molly's perceptions of the Regency Grand are of its colors and presentations of shiny, glossy surfaces. It's not subtle, goodness knows, but it's very effective because of the narrator's neurodivergence. It's very easy to see that this brightness of vision is intentional and it's all down to interpretation for Molly to be able to present what she's so clearly seen in self-exculpatory ways.

The final scene, a lovely piece of courtroom theater, will make Florence Pugh a bigger star than she is when the film is eventually released. It is so very,very satisfying that I can only blush while reporting the honest truth that I cheered a little and even had a humidity condensation event around my ocular area.

Don't tell anyone.