I added this book on my TBR list soon after its publication, because it was associated with Donna Tartt’s Secret History and with dark academia. I don’t think I realized at the time that it was a recent release, nor did I know before turning the last page that it had been written during the 2020 lockdown. I had never heard about Alex Michaelides and have not read his bestselling Silent Patient (which I mistakenly associated with the English Patient… now that makes me laugh so much harder)
I like to think I didn’t have high expectations for this book but in retrospect that’s not entirely true. Cambridge University, Greek drama professor, dark secrets… this sounded so perfect to me… Comparing it to The Secret History is not doing it any favor.
The story is told by Mariana, a group therapist in London, who studied at Cambridge and who is grieving the loss of her beloved husband the year before. Her niece Zoe, Mariana’s only relative left, is studying in Cambridge and in Professor Fosca’s Greek drama study group and she’s in shock after the murder of a classmate. In this moment of crisis Zoe has confided to Mariana, and now Mariana is convinced that Professor Fosca is a murderer.
The main problem I have with the novel is that very few characters and events are believable, starting with Mariana. What a weird therapist who reads situations wrong time and time again, who over-analyzes people around her, using concepts that read like basic pop science magazine sentences (but only when it’s convenient), who has no boundaries and no method. I can understand that she is troubled, but… She drops her patients and launches into a murder investigation based on… what? A fellow therapist and police scientific advisor finds it fully normal to let her onto a crime scene… and that’s just the beginning.
I wanted very much to know the secret and so I kept reading till the end (to its credit this is a very easy read). But the revelations at the end made hardly any sense! So disappointing…
The one thing that made me laugh is that in my opinion you can tell it was written during lockdown: all the characters are desperate to meet in cafés, restaurants, do things in groups… At almost no moment does Mariana wish to reflect on her own, although there would be plenty of reasons to.
One good thing with The Maidens is that it made me really want to discover Cambridge, and it seems that we really might go there this summer after all! So not everything was lost with this book.
This book featured on a post on Dark Academia in Modern Mrs. Darcy. Although this one was not a success I’m still eagerly looking at the other titles in this subgenre! Any novel you might want to recommend? Bonus points if the book is set in Cambridge!
Smithereens 