My Rating: 3 stars
Being one of the few people out there who hasn't yet read The Silent Patient (though I am familiar with all the buzz surrounding the book, as it seemed like everyone couldn't stop talking about it), I went into Alex Michaelides' second novel The Maidens with very few (if any) expectations. In the end, I found this new sophomore effort quite lackluster for the most part — and while I can't use the word "disappointing" (since I haven't read The Silent Patient so I don't have a comparison point) to describe this one, I can say that I would be surprised if it gets the same level of hype as its predecessor.
Overall, I found this to be a run-of-the-mill psychological thriller that, while entertaining, largely lacked substance. In addition to not liking any of the characters in the story (more on this later), I felt the main problem with this book is the plausibility factor — meaning that much of the plot, the way things played out, didn't make a whole lot of sense. In fact, some of the plot points felt far-fetched to the point that I had to suspend disbelief through most of it. For me, one of the most glaring nonsensical plot points was to have a murder investigation team — from the chief inspector to the forensic analysts to everyone in between — be so utterly useless and incompetent, it was beyond laughable (the investigation was akin to child's play essentially — there was little to no "professionalism" to speak). Another plot point that didn't make sense was to have a therapist (the story's main protagonist Mariana) with no criminal investigation experience and who was essentially a stranger (she was an alumni of the university where the murders occurred and her niece was currently in attendance at the university) be "allowed" to keep repeatedly (and defiantly) inserting herself into the investigation (not only that, she seemed to have free reign on campus too, which I thought was odd considering she was neither faculty nor student — she was even able to book rooms and have meetings with people as though she lived there, even though she supposedly hadn't set foot on campus for over 20 years). Speaking of Mariana, she was a character I actually couldn't stand at all — I felt like for most of the story, she was either pining for her dead husband (who seemed to get conjured up into Mariana's thoughts every couple pages) or irrationally working herself into a frenzy over some aspect of the murder cases (which, again, had nothing to do with her).
Not surprisingly, this was actually a thriller where I figured everything out pretty early on, as it was fairly obvious in my opinion — but of course I kept reading because I was curious whether I got it right. For this reason, the "big reveal" ended up being anti-climactic for me and there really wasn't much of a "twist" to speak of (nothing that kept me on the edge of my seat or made my jaw drop). I also felt there were way too many distractions with the storyline, most of which were unnecessary — red herrings galore that I assume were meant to cleverly distract but instead convoluted the story in a way that made it frustrating to read (at least for me).
With all that said, there were parts of the story I did appreciate, such as the atmospheric way that the university campus and its surroundings were described. I also thought the various connections to Greek mythology were interesting and done in a way that didn't require much prior knowledge to the subject matter, so it was accessible to the average reader.
Since I already feel like I've said too much, I will go ahead and end it here. I will say that I did like this one overall, but I didn't feel that it was anything special — it's basically a thriller I'll read once and forget about. I know I'm probably an outlier with this one, so I would recommend checking out the other reviews for a more balanced perspective. And yes, I still do intend on reading The Silent Patient at some point — who knows, maybe my opinion will change after reading that one, especially since I was told there is a connection between both books.
Received ARC from Celadon Books via their Early Reader program.
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