The Maid is a book about a young hotel maid, Molly Gray, written by Nita Prose in 2022. It is a work of fiction that falls in the contemporary mystery genre. Molly is on the autism spectrum and has OCD. This causes her to have an unusual worldview and often gets her in uncomfortable situations. She is considered odd by many of her peers and treated with little courtesy.
The Maid provides insight into a very obsolete topic, the life of hotel maids. How they float in and out of rooms, drift through the hallways, and observe things no one else does. The little details about people that their rooms provide. Molly even says, “I am your maid. I know so much about you. But when it comes down to it: what is it that you know about me?” (Prose 3). She points out that patrons will ignore her completely and treat her as if she is not there. It brings to light the treatment higher classes give people they deem below them.
This all becomes relevant to the plot of the book when one day Molly discovers the dead body of Mr. Black, a very wealthy hotel patron, in one of the hotel suites. Due to the circumstances and her own confusion as to the events that took place, the police deem her suspicious. Things only get worse as charismatic bartender, Rodney Stiles, emotionally manipulates Molly causing her to get deeply entangled in the whole mess. Everything comes to a head when Molly is arrested. Eventually, Molly and her friends figure out what really happened and expose the real killer.
It was a very smooth and elegant book. The author uses vivid imagery to bring the world of Molly the Maid to life, the elegant hotel, and the contrasting normalcy of her apartment. The Maid really makes you think about how manipulative people are and how in our society people often don’t really say what they mean. This is highlighted through Molly's rather simple mindset, she takes most things at face value. It really made me think about how our whole world is filled with these social cues and norms that everyone is just expected to pick up on and respond to well. Molly gives insightful thoughts such as, “laughs are just like smiles. People use them to express an array of confounding emotions” (Prose 156). Molly has this unique outlook on people's behaviors that makes reading this book a really special experience. She points out that people's motives and actions are never really what they seem. It makes you stop and look back over the conversations you have on a daily basis and how often they are choking with social cues and false pretenses.
I fully agree with the message that the author is conveying of how our lives are dominated by societal expectations and how the little things impact our daily lives. Moving on, The Maid was a very well-written book that was very coherent and flowed nicely. It had clear and precise wording.
My only criticism is that it lacked emotion. The overarching message was powerful but the book itself had very little emotion. While this matches the tone and the specificity of the book, it is a bit flat. I loved the concept and hope to read further works by the author. My advice to anyone reading this in the future is to be open to Molly's point of view. Otherwise one goes through the book disagreeing with Molly's statements and actions. It makes it harder to read if one is consistently rejecting Molly's thoughts.
It reminded me a bit of John Green's book, Turtles All the Way Down in that it talks about mental illnesses in a very frank and understandable way. All in all, I thought this was an excellent book and highly recommend it to lovers of the contemporary mystery genre.
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