{"id":1280,"date":"2022-03-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-30T20:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=1280"},"modified":"2025-05-03T17:20:53","modified_gmt":"2025-05-03T05:20:53","slug":"the-maid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2022\/03\/26\/the-maid\/","title":{"rendered":"The Maid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nita Prose<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

HarperCollins<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, March 26th 2022<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Despite the review copy\u2019s back cover proclaiming The Maid<\/em> \u2018an Event Publication\u2019 and with a movie adaptation already underway, I did not hold out great hopes for Nita Prose\u2019s debut novel. After all, as a longtime editor and the current vice president of Simon & Schuster Canada, she has an inside line on people of influence. As such, I was pleasantly surprised by the sweetly funny mystery she has created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Molly, the novel\u2019s central character and narrator, is the perfect maid: conscientious, efficient, polite, discreet, and highly appreciative of her position at the five-star Regency Grand Hotel. Her inability to read facial expressions or behavioural cues means she has few friends and struggles with social situations, but at work she can transform herself into \u201ca bright, unique square, integral to the tapestry\u2026. I love cleaning, I love my maid\u2019s trolley, and I love my uniform\u2026[it] is my freedom. It is the ultimate invisibility cloak\u201d<\/em>. This sense of identity is particularly important now that her Gran, who has raised her since childhood, has passed away, so when one of Molly\u2019s guests dies under mysterious circumstances and she finds herself the main suspect in a murder investigation, her carefully constructed world begins to fall apart. Clearing her name and differentiating true friends from \u2018bad eggs\u2019 will take all her considerable intellectual resources, tasks that require the forging of connection with others and a recognition that the truth \u2013 and justice \u2013 are subjective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The nefarious goings-on at the Regency Grand could have been lifted straight out of a B-grade gangster and the action, which unfolds over the course of a working week, is wildly unlikely, but neither matters since the plot is there primarily as a pedestal on which to display the loveable Molly. Like the protagonist of Mark Haddon\u2019s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time<\/em>, she is both precocious and innocent. She is very self-aware and articulate but endearingly child-like in other ways: her attraction to a fellow employee resembles a teenage crush, and she frequently repeats her Gran\u2019s aphorisms \u2013 \u201cwhen all else fails, tidy up\u201d, \u201cclean conscience, clean life\u201d, \u201cwhen you assume you make an A-S-S out of U and Me\u201d \u2013 to herself to calm herself during times of stress. Her desire to please and clear sense of right and wrong make her an ideal employee, but her social blindness and tendency to believe the best of others leave her vulnerable to manipulation. We are further inclined to sympathy by the first-person narration that provides direct access to Molly\u2019s thoughts and emotions, and the careful control of what she reveals conceals a plot twist I honestly didn\u2019t see coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the story ludicrous? Yes. Is it great literature? No. But The Maid<\/em> is a light and entertaining read that recognises and celebrates both neurodiversity and the oft-invisible labour of service. The real triumph of the story, however, is Molly, whose delightful character kept this reader engaged and onside to the very end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nita Prose HarperCollins Otago Daily Times, March 26th 2022 Despite the review copy\u2019s back cover proclaiming The Maid \u2018an Event Publication\u2019 and with a movie adaptation already underway, I did not hold out great hopes for Nita Prose\u2019s debut novel. After all, as a longtime editor and the current vice president of Simon & Schuster […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[381,370,506,389,18],"class_list":["post-1280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-381","tag-fiction","tag-murder-mystery","tag-nita-prose","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1281,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions\/1281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}