It turns out that the mood for thrillers is here to stay; I am actually currently reading an old-school (kinda) crime/detective novel with a serial killer and I am having a lot of fun with it, but we are not here to talk about that (although I will mention it in this week's Coffee Letter). Today we talk about Alex Michaelides's second novel, The Maidens.
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| ★★★☆☆ |
The reason why I did not start with his first novel, The Silent Patient, is because this was a buddy-read with two work colleagues - my usual buddy-read-in-crime, Bianca, and Oana. Oana already read The Silent Patient so for her birthday we got her this book and decided to read it together. Reading thrillers with other people and sharing theories is a lot of fun, way more fun that this book was on its own.
"Don’t glorify the events of your life and try to give them meaning. There is no meaning. Life means nothing. Death means nothing. But she didn’t always think that way."
For the Love of Unreliable Protagonists
The novel follows our protagonist, Mariana, who is a group therapist. One day she receives a call from her niece that a murder took place at her school. Mariana travel to her niece's school and somehow ends up staying to investigate the murder. She is convinced the Greek Tragedy professor did it. But did he?
Mariana is still grieving his husband. Is that clouding her judgement? Does it make her an unreliable character? Or is she just plain stupid? I tried to use better words, but having Mariana as a main character definitely made me miss unreliable protagonists. I'd much rather not trust everything our protagonist is thinking or doing than spend every other page shouting at the main protagonist for falling for obvious red herrings.
"Mariana might not be a detective, but she was a therapist, and she knew how to listen. To listen not only to what was being said, but also to everything unsaid, all the words unspoken—the lies, evasions, projections, transferences, and other psychological phenomena that occurred between two people, and that required a special kind of listening."
Dark Academia
From the first moment I saw the cover of The Maidens my mind jumped instantly to The Secret History. Then you realise Mariana's main suspect is a Greek Tragedy professor who has an elite group of students surrounding him. That is more or less The Secret History.
I think the author either tried his hand at dark academia (and it kinda failed) or he tried to cash in on the dark academia trend going around on booktok. The book has mythology, has that hint of Greek tragedy, it has an academic setting and a bunch of enigmatic character, but it fails to go deeper, to captivate in that way that dark academia books do it. And this is what bothered me the most, the book tried to be something more than a fun thriller and it did not deliver.
The sparse writing and short chapters made for a quick read, but not for a compelling story and it did not provide enough room to make me care for any of the characters.
"Mariana no longer saw the world in color. Life was muted and gray and far away, behind a veil—behind a mist of sadness."
Oh, the Red Herrings
As I am writing this review I realise my rating is higher because I had fun buddy-reading it with my friends, but if I were to judge this outside of the buddy-read... well, I don't have that many good things to say about it.
The book is predictable in a bad way. Predictability doesn't bother me if done right, but in this novel the red herrings are just too damn obvious and the characters the reader is supposed to suspect are just too weird or creepy to also be the killer. It's a whodunit a bit too easy to solve and I am not saying that just because I read a lot of thrillers. I mean I can guess things and still enjoy a thriller like I did with The Heiress by Rachel Hawkins. But that novel was intriguing, it was exciting, it was subtle. The Maidens is just too obvious.
"After all, everyone’s entitled to be the hero of their own story. So I must be permitted to be the hero of mine. Even though I’m not. I’m the villain."
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides was first published in June 2021
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