maid book review new york times

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Book Review

• Suspense/Thriller , Young Adult Fiction

Readability Age Range

• 13 year old and up
• Ballantine Books
• New York Times bestseller; Good Morning America Book Club Pick

Year Published

Molly the maid isn’t like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and can’t quite understand the true intent of others. One thing she understands perfectly, though, are the intricacies of a good clean. And when bad people frame this perfect maid for murder, she works to find a clean way out.

Plot Summary

Gran used to help. She’d guide Molly and she always loved her. She raised her from a little girl when Molly’s mom left. But then Gran got sick. And no matter how hard Molly tried, she couldn’t stop the inevitable: Gran died. Then the color drained from the rooms they lived in together. And now Molly is alone.

Alone is very difficult for someone like Molly Gray. This 20-something isn’t like everyone else. She can’t quite understand smiles and frowns. She can’t read the things that people really think and feel. She doesn’t see “the signals.”

It’s not that she’s slow or unobservant. Quite the opposite, really. But to Molly, a smile and sweet words mean that someone is good —even when they’re not. Gran always told her that a book and its cover can be two completely different things. A smile and a nice word can be mean from the wrong person.

It’s all quite confusing.  

There’s only one thing that Molly truly understands, only one choice that holds no mysteries, no subterfuge: cleaning. To make the dirty clean, to scrub away a stain and return a room to its perfection, that is bliss. And that is what Molly does best.

Molly is a maid at the Regency Grand, a five-star boutique hotel that prides itself on “sophisticated elegance and proper decorum for the modern age.” Never in her life did she ever think she’d hold such a lofty position. But here she is, wearing her crisp, clean uniform; filling her housekeeping trolley with soaps and disinfectants; returning sullied rooms to perfection, over and over. When she enters the Regency Grand each day, the world turns Technicolor bright!

However, just like people, there are signals and things about the Regency Grand that Molly can’t quite understand. Wealthy people doing unscrupulous things. People being hurt, coerced and used. Bad things that you’ll only spot if you know where and how to look. But even though she’s right there in the midst, Molly doesn’t know. She doesn’t see them.

Molly the Maid will have to figure out some things soon, however. For unbeknownst to her, she’s been helping the wrong people; she’s been a part of something very wrong that she thought was very right; and she’s soon to be accused … of murder.

Gran would’ve understood. Gran would have helped Molly sort everything out.

But Gran isn’t here any longer.

And someone has to clean up this mess.

Christian Beliefs

Molly frequently repeats phrases, lessons and sayings that her gran drilled into her as rules to live by. Some of those are: “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” and the biblically based saying “treat others as you wish to be treated.”

Molly also repeats the Serenity Prayer that Gran crocheted into a pillow: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

At one point, a protective friend named Juan Manuel says “Dios te bendiga” to Molly, which is Spanish for God bless you . Molly remembers celebrating Christmas with Gran.

Other Belief Systems

Molly states that “one must live by her own moral code, not follow like a sheep, blindly.” And while Molly’s belief system isn’t necessarily Christian, she is guided by the morals and rules that her gran instilled in her. She hates lying and cheating and repeatedly strives to do right by others and fix the wrongs that she’s done (even when done innocently).

At the same time, Molly is also very aware that she is always playing with a deficit in the game of life. “The truth is, I often have trouble with social situations; it’s as though everyone is playing an elaborate game with complex rules they all know, but I’m always playing for the first time,” she says.

Authority Roles

Gran is obviously the biggest influence in Molly’s life. She selflessly raised Molly when Molly’s drug-addicted mom and “bad egg” dad both abandoned her. Gran helps and loves Molly, always preparing her to live happily when she’s someday on her own.

Mr. Snow, the hotel manager, is also a mentor of sorts in Molly’s life, but not a necessarily strong one. The hotel doorman, Mr. Preston, is a true-blue friend who once knew Molly’s grandmother well. He checks in with the young woman regularly, and he’s upright and instrumental in following through and helping her overcome her troubles.

Other people in Molly’s orbit are far less consistent. Some talk behind her back and call her names that she overhears. And a local, cynical detective suspects that Molly’s rather innocent and straightforward perspective is all an act to help her escape criminal prosecution.

Profanity & Violence

Molly isn’t one to swear, other than repeating a “Gran-ism” that includes a spelled-out profanity. Molly also doesn’t like nastiness from the people around her. But there are some in this tale that break out with a bit of foul language—including four f-words and a few lesser crudities.

There are two deaths in the story. One is a murder and the other a mercy killing. And while neither killing is openly praised, the deaths are “accepted” by the story because the former resulted in an innocent’s release from abuse, and the latter resulted in a loved one’s release from the physical misery of severe disease. (Neither killer is held accountable.)

Molly recognizes an angry, violent streak in a rich man who stays regularly at the hotel, and she befriends the man’s wife, making note of the bruises on the woman’s arms. A friend of Molly’s also has burns on his arms that she later learns were signs of painful torture and coercion.

Molly sometimes thinks of violent things she might do to someone who has purposely wronged her or someone she cares about. For instance, she imagines pouring bleach down the throat of a man who stole all of her and her grandmother’s savings. And she thinks of “bad things” she wants to do to someone else who cheats her.

An undocumented man is threatened with harm or death to his family in Mexico if he doesn’t do as he’s told.

Drug deals involving cocaine and benzodiazepine take place in the hotel. Molly actually walks in on men who have been preparing cocaine for sale, and she innocently cleans up the mess without recognizing what it is. A bottle of spilled and crushed benzodiazepine is found at a murder scene. Someone puts prescription painkillers into someone’s tea to dull that individual’s senses before asphyxiating them.  

Several people drink hard alcohol such as gin and scotch from the hotel minibar. Molly drinks a glass of chardonnay while having dinner with someone and feels its effects.

Sexual Content

Molly has a crush on three different men in the story. One abuses her trust and steals everything she has; another manipulates her innocence and the third is a kind and earnest guy. It’s stated that she and the third guy move in together, but it’s unclear whether they marry or not. Molly is kissed on the cheek by one man and kisses another on the mouth.

At the beginning of the book, Molly makes it clear that she understands that some people are likely doing things—such as sexual trysts—at the hotel that they wouldn’t want others to know about. “I’m the one who cleans up after you drink too much and soil the toilet seat, or worse,” she notes. “It’s as though all your filth, all your lies and deceit, have been erased.”

She also notes that one wealthy husband is cheating on his wife with multiple mistresses. She is also surprised by one woman’s affair that she didn’t see happening.

Discussion Topics

Get free discussion question for books at focusonthefamily.com/magazine/thriving-family-book-discussion-questions .

Additional Comments

The Maid is a well-written, character-driven story that ends up being a murder mystery. Its popularity, and the fact that it’s in development as a major motion picture produced by and starring Florence Pugh, will draw young reader’s interest.

It should be noted, however, that in spite of the protagonist’s sincerity and seeming innocence, there are some hard issues at play here—including murder, illicit drug deals and the justification of a mercy killing.

You can request a review of a title you can’t find at [email protected] .

Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not necessarily their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. The inclusion of a book’s review does not constitute an endorsement by Focus on the Family.

Review by Bob Hoose

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Toronto author's bestselling novel The Maid started as an idea on a napkin

Nita prose says the idea came to her like a 'lightning bolt'.

Social Sharing

Canadian author Nita Prose's debut novel,  The Maid , became a New York Times and Canadian bestseller just a few weeks after its Jan. 4 release.

The longtime Toronto editor is currently the vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster — a publishing house that's home to renowned authors such as home body and milk and honey author Rupi Kaur , and Long Way Down and Look Both Ways author Jason Reynolds, among others.

"The day [ The Maid ] was published was a really important moment because it was no longer mine. It was now something that belonged to the readers," Prose told CBC News. "I'll never read it the same way again."

Prose is the latest industry professional to become a best-selling author, following in the footsteps of fellow Canadian Ashley Audrain and her debut novel, The Push , which came out in 2021.

LISTEN | Why Nita Prose calls her novel The Maid a 'murder mystery with a lot of heart:'

A 'whodunit'

The Maid, published by Penguin Random House Canada, is a gripping mystery about an awkward yet perfectionist hotel maid, Molly, who becomes the lead suspect in a murder case after finding a dead man in his hotel room. 

"This is a novel about what it means to be the same as everyone else and yet entirely different. I think of it as a whodunit," Prose said. 

"It's maybe a little bit different, too, because the mystery can only be solved through a connection to the human heart in Molly."

The story hit the author like a 'lightning bolt'

In 2019, Prose was staying at a hotel during a business trip in London. One evening, when she returned to her room, she says she completely startled the hotel's maid.

"I remember her stepping back into a shadowy corner, and the embarrassing part is she had in her hands my track pants, which like a fool I had left in a tangled mess on my bed."

It was then Prose realized how being a maid was such an intimate and invisible job. On the plane ride back home, her main character came to her like a "lightning bolt," she said.

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"Molly's voice was clean and crisp and precise. I didn't have any paper so I grabbed the napkin from under my drink and I wrote the prologue to The Maid in a single burst," she said.  

"I didn't realize that I was actually starting my debut novel."

Hits just the right moment

Novels like The Maid  can do well as a debut thanks to planning and timing, said Haley Cullingham, a senior editor at Hazlitt and Strange Light and editor-at-large at McClelland & Stewart, based in Toronto.

"Fundamentally, it is that perfect moment of a really wonderful manuscript and great marketing and publicity," she said. "Things work when every part of the process comes together and hits just the right moment."

She also talked about how important a powerful character is to audiences — the fundamental quality to a good story.

"We see people respond to a powerful character and voice. That's something that's really capturing people and the idea of something that creates a sense of community."

Toronto-based writer of A Hero of Our Time, Naben Ruthnum, who also writes under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley, says a good story has two characteristics: a protagonist audiences can connect to, and a driving storyline that can be translated into different formats. 

"That's a feature of a story that I think The Maid has, you can tell that story out loud or on screen, and it's just as exciting as it was on the page."

'The Maid' gets a new life on screen

Universal Pictures also picked up Prose's book before it was published to adapt it into a film, although the release date has not been announced. Oscar nominee Florence Pugh is set to play the title character in the film, according to Deadline .

The Midsommar and Little Women star is also set to executive produce the film, alongside Prose.

"I am incredibly lucky because the people that I've been working with so far have taken my material and amplified it in ways that I could have never dreamed of," Prose said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shae Hayes is a writer for CBC News entertainment and education.

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The Maid Book Review

• Author: Nita Prose
• Genre: Mystery
• Type: Novel
• Publisher: HarperCollins

In “The Maid” by Nita Prose, readers are introduced to amateur sleuth Molly Gray, a maid working at the luxurious Regency Grand Hotel.

When Molly stumbles upon the body of a dead guest, Mr. Black, she becomes entangled in a web of mystery and deception at the hotel. As Molly delves deeper into the investigation , themes of visibility and truth come to the forefront, challenging her perception of the world around her.

“The Maid” by Nita Prose is a riveting mystery novel that kept me on the edge of my seat from start to finish. The character of Molly Gray is both endearing and relatable, making her journey through the secrets of the Regency Grand Hotel all the more captivating.

Prose’s storytelling is gripping, with unexpected twists and turns that kept me guessing until the very end. The exploration of social class distinctions and power dynamics added depth to the narrative, making it a thought-provoking read.

I highly recommend “The Maid” to anyone who enjoys a well-crafted mystery thriller with strong character development and a compelling storyline. Nita Prose’s skilful writing and engaging plot make this book a must-read for fans of the genre.

Pick up a copy of “The Maid” and prepare to be drawn into a world of secrets, intrigue, and unexpected revelations.

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Nita Prose is a bestselling author known for her debut novel, “THE MAID,” which has achieved international success with over 1 million copies sold worldwide and published in over forty countries.

The book has been a #1 NEW YORK TIMES bestseller and was selected for the Good Morning America Book Club . Prose’s writing has earned critical acclaim, winning the Ned Kelly Award for International Crime Fiction and being a finalist for the Edgar Award.

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Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2019

New York Times Bestseller

HARD WORK, LOW PAY, AND A MOTHER'S WILL TO SURVIVE

by Stephanie Land ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 22, 2019

An important memoir that should be required reading for anyone who has never struggled with poverty.

First-time author Land chronicles her years among the working poor as a single mother with only a high school diploma trying to earn a living as a minimum-wage housecleaner.

The author did not grow up in poverty, but her struggles slowly evolved after her parents divorced, remarried, and essentially abandoned her; after she gave birth to a daughter fathered by a man who never stopped being abusive; and after her employment prospects narrowed to dirty jobs with absurdly low hourly pay. The relentlessly depressing, quotidian narrative maintains its power due to Land’s insights into working as an invisible maid inside wealthy homes; her self-awareness as a loving but inadequate mother to her infant; and her struggles to survive domestic violence. For readers who believe individuals living below the poverty line are lazy and/or intellectually challenged, this memoir is a stark, necessary corrective. Purposefully or otherwise, the narrative also offers a powerful argument for increasing government benefits for the working poor during an era when most benefits are being slashed. Though the benefits received by Land and her daughter after mountains of paperwork never led to financial stability, they did ameliorate near starvation. The author is especially detailed and insightful on the matter of government-issued food stamps. Some of the most memorable scenes recount the shaming Land received when using the food stamps to purchase groceries. Throughout, Land has been sustained by her fierce love for her daughter and her dreams of becoming a professional writer and escaping northwest Washington state by settling in the seemingly desirable city of Missoula, Montana. She had never visited Missoula, but she imagined it as paradise. Near the end of the book, Land finally has enough money and time to visit Missoula, and soon after the visit, the depression lifts.

Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-316-50511-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hachette

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2016

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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The Maid: The Sunday Times and No.1 New York Times bestseller, and Winner of the Goodreads Choice Awards for best mystery thriller (A Molly the Maid mystery, Book 1) Kindle Edition

*molly the maid returns in the mystery guest – available to buy now*.

_________________________________________________________________

Curl up with the million-copy bestseller . . .

*THE NO.1 NEW YORK TIMES & SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER *WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD FOR BEST MYSTERY/THRILLER *WINNER OF THE NED KELLY AWARD FOR BEST INTERNATIONAL CRIME FICTION *A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME PICK

‘An escapist pleasure ’ SUNDAY TIMES ‘An instantly gripping whodunnit’ STYLIST ‘Smart, riveting, and deliciously refreshing ’ LISA JEWELL _________________________________________________________________

It begins like any other day for Molly Gray, silently dusting her way through the luxury rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel.

But when she enters suite 401 and discovers an infamous guest dead in his bed , a very messy mystery begins to unfold. And Molly’s at the heart of it – because if anyone can uncover the secrets beneath the surface, the fingerprints amongst the filth – it’s the maid . . .

_______________________________________________________

Everyone’s getting swept away by The Maid :

‘Excellent and totally entertaining . . . the most interesting (and endearing) main character in a long time’ STEPHEN KING

‘This is phenomenal thriller. Maid or murderer or victim? Find out in the book’ READER REVIEW ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘Gripping, deftly written, and led by a truly unforgettable protagonist in Molly. I'm recommending it to everyone I know' EMMA STONEX

‘I loved everything about this book’ READER REVIEW ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘I didn’t think I could love a character any more than I loved Eleanor Oliphant but along comes Molly the Maid. God, I love her’ READER REVIEW ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘Fresh, fiendish and darkly beguiling. The Maid is so thrillingly original, and clever, and joyous. I just adored every page’ CHRIS WHITAKER

‘Felt like a modern day homage to Agatha Christie’ READER REVIEW ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘Lots of twists and turns and highly gripping’ READER REVIEW ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Sunday Times No.4 bestseller for w/c 24/01/2022

A New York Times No.1 bestseller for w/c 31/01/2022

Nita Prose's book 'The Maid' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 2023-05-01.

• Book 1 of 3 Molly the Maid
• Print length 349 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher HarperCollins
• Publication date 20 Jan. 2022
• File size 3049 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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From the Publisher

Product description

‘Excellent and totally entertaining… the most interesting (and endearing) main character in a long time’ Stephen King

‘A smart, riveting, and deliciously refreshing debut. Prose knows how to pen a murder mystery with tremendous heart’ Lisa Jewell

‘The book’s endearing central character and atmospheric hotel setting make it an escapist pleasure ― a mini-break between the pages’ Sunday Times

‘Finally booksellers have a concrete answer to the question 'I loved Eleanor Oliphant – what should I read next?'’ Bookbrunch

‘A gripping and heart-warming whodunnit narrated by an intriguing and original heroine. Skilfully layered and masterfully told. I loved it’ Santa Montefiore

‘An endearing debut . . . Prose threads a steady needle with the intricate plotting’ New York Times

‘The Maid is elegant, warm-hearted and wry, and Molly the most winningly off-beat narrator since Eleanor Oliphant. An absolute joy’ Louise Candlish

‘An instantly gripping and delightful whodunnit’ Stylist

‘I enjoyed every minute of this twisty yet tender thriller. The Maid is gripping, deftly written, and led by a truly unforgettable protagonist in Molly. I'm recommending it to everyone I know' Emma Stonex

‘Nita Prose has created a true 21st Century heroine in a brilliantly-written, transformative story’ Janice Hallett

‘Molly the Maid has captured my heart! I loved this charming and utterly original whodunit . . . Put this on your to-read pile immediately’ Sarah Pearse

‘Unlike anything else I’ve read, this kept me up way past lights out’ Katie Fforde

‘This is going to be HUGE! A heroine as loveable and quirky as Eleanor Oliphant, caught up in a crime worthy of Agatha Christie. Loved it!’ Clare Pooley

‘A contemporary murder mystery with a unique heroine who will appeal to Eleanor Oliphant fans’ Daily Mail

From the Back Cover

About the author.

NITA PROSE is a long-time editor, serving many bestselling authors and their books. She lives in Toronto, Canada, in a house that is only moderately clean.

www.nitaprose.com @NitaProse

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I am well aware that my name is ridiculous. It was not ridiculous before I took this job four years ago. I’m a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel, and my name is Molly. Molly Maid. A joke. Before I took the job, Molly was just a name, given to me by my estranged mother, who left me so long ago that I have no memory of her, just a few photos and the stories Gran has told me. Gran said my mother thought Molly was a cute name for a girl, that it conjured apple cheeks and pigtails, neither of which I have, as it turns out. I’ve got simple, dark hair that I maintain in a sharp, neat bob. I part my hair in the middle—­the exact middle. I comb it flat and straight. I like things simple and neat.

I have pointed cheekbones and pale skin that people sometimes marvel at, and I don’t know why. I’m as white as the sheets that I take off and put on, take off and put on, all day long in the twenty-­plus rooms that I make up for the esteemed guests at the Regency Grand, a five-­star boutique hotel that prides itself on “sophisticated elegance and proper decorum for the modern age.”

Never in my life did I think I’d hold such a lofty position in a grand hotel. I know others think differently, that a maid is a lowly nobody. I know we’re all supposed to aspire to become doctors and lawyers and rich real-estate tycoons. But not me. I’m so thankful for my job that I pinch myself every day. I really do. Especially now, without Gran. Without her, home isn’t home. It’s as though all the color has been drained from the apartment we shared. But the moment I enter the Regency Grand, the world turns Technicolor bright.

As I place a hand on the shining brass railing and walk up the scarlet steps that lead to the hotel’s majestic portico, I’m Dorothy entering Oz. I push through the gleaming revolving doors and I see my true self reflected in the glass—­my dark hair and pale complexion are omnipresent, but a blush returns to my cheeks, my raison d’être restored once more.

Once I’m through the doors, I often pause to take in the grandeur of the lobby. It never tarnishes. It never grows drab or dusty. It never dulls or fades. It is blessedly the same each and every day. There’s the reception and concierge to the left, with its midnight-­obsidian counter and smart-looking receptionists in black and white, like penguins. And there’s the ample lobby itself, laid out in a horseshoe, with its fine Italian marble floors that radiate pristine white, drawing the eye up, up to the second-­floor terrace. There are the ornate Art Deco features of the terrace and the grand staircase that brings you there, balustrades glowing and opulent, serpents twisting up to golden knobs held static in brass jaws. Guests will often stand at the rails, hands resting on a glowing post, as they survey the glorious scene below—­porters marching crisscross, dragging suitcases behind them, guests lounging in sumptuous armchairs or couples tucked into emerald loveseats, their secrets absorbed into the deep, plush velvet.

But perhaps my favorite part of the lobby is the olfactory sensation, that first redolent breath as I take in the scent of the hotel itself at the start of every shift—­the mélange of ladies’ fine perfumes, the dark musk of the leather armchairs, the tangy zing of lemon polish that’s used twice daily on the gleaming marble floors. It is the very scent of animus. It is the fragrance of life itself.

Every day, when I arrive to work at the Regency Grand, I feel alive again, part of the fabric of things, the splendor and the color. I am part of the design, a bright, unique square, integral to the tapestry.

Gran used to say, “If you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life.” And she’s right. Every day of work is a joy to me. I was born to do this job. I love cleaning, I love my maid’s trolley, and I love my uniform.

There’s nothing quite like a perfectly stocked maid’s trolley early in the morning. It is, in my humble opinion, a cornucopia of bounty and beauty. The crisp little packages of delicately wrapped soaps that smell of orange blossom, the tiny Crabtree & Evelyn shampoo bottles, the squat tissue boxes, the toilet-­paper rolls wrapped in hygienic film, the bleached white towels in three sizes—­bath, hand, and washcloth—­and the stacks of doilies for the tea-­and-­coffee service tray. And last but not least, the cleaning kit, which includes a feather duster, lemon furniture polish, lightly scented antiseptic garbage bags, as well as an impressive array of spray bottles of solvents and disinfectants, all lined up and ready to combat any stain, be it coffee rings, vomit—­or even blood. A well-­stocked housekeeping trolley is a portable sanitation miracle; it is a clean machine on wheels. And as I said, it is beautiful.

And my uniform. If I had to choose between my uniform and my trolley, I don’t think I could. My uniform is my freedom. It is the ultimate invisibility cloak. At the Regency Grand, it’s dry cleaned daily in the hotel laundry, which is located in the dank bowels of the hotel down the hall from our housekeeping change rooms. Every day before I arrive at work, my uniform is hooked on my locker door. It comes wrapped in clingy plastic, with a little Post-­it note that has my name scrawled on it in black marker. What a joy it is to see it there in the morning, my second skin—­clean, disinfected, newly pressed, smelling like a mixture of fresh paper, an indoor pool, and nothingness. A new beginning. It’s as though the day before and the many days before that have all been erased.

When I don my maid uniform—­not the frumpy Downton Abbey style or even the Playboy-­bunny cliché, but the blinding-­white starched dress shirt and the slim-­fit black pencil skirt (made from stretchy fabric for easy bending)—­I am whole. Once I’m dressed for my workday, I feel more confident, like I know just what to say and do—­at least, most of the time. And once I take off my uniform at the end of the day, I feel naked, unprotected, undone.

The truth is, I often have trouble with social situations; it’s as though everyone is playing an elaborate game with complex rules they all know, but I’m always playing for the first time. I make etiquette mistakes with alarming regularity, offend when I mean to compliment, misread body language, say the wrong thing at the wrong time. It’s only because of my gran that I know a smile doesn’t necessarily mean someone is happy. Sometimes, people smile when they’re laughing at you. Or they’ll thank you when they really want to slap you across the face. Gran used to say my reading of behaviors was improving—­ every day in every way, my dear —­but now, without her, I struggle. Before, when I rushed home after work, I’d throw open the door to our apartment and ask her questions I’d saved up over the day. “I’m home! Gran, does ketchup really work on brass, or should I stick to salt and vinegar? Is it true that some people drink tea with cream? Gran, why did they call me Rumba at work today?”

But now, when the door to home opens, there’s no “Oh, Molly dear, I can explain” or “Let me make you a proper cuppa and I’ll answer all of that.” Now our cozy two-­bedroom feels hollow and lifeless and empty, like a cave. Or a coffin. Or a grave.

I think it’s because I have difficulty interpreting expressions that I’m the last person anyone invites to a party, even though I really like parties. Apparently, I make awkward conversation, and if you believe the whispers, I have no friends my age. To be fair, this is one hundred percent accurate. I have no friends my age, few friends of any age, for that matter.

But at work, when I’m wearing my uniform, I blend in. I become part of the hotel’s décor, like the black-­and-­white-­striped wallpaper that adorns many a hallway and room. In my uniform, as long as I keep my mouth shut, I can be anyone. You could see me in a police lineup and fail to pick me out even though you walked by me ten times in one day.

Recently, I turned twenty-­five, “a quarter of a century” my gran would proclaim to me now if she could say anything to me. Which she can’t, because she is dead.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08R8SH69Y
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins (20 Jan. 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 3049 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
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• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 349 pages
• 2 in Lawyers & Criminals Humour
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About the author

Nita Prose is the author of THE MYSTERY GUEST and THE MAID, which has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide and was published in over forty countries. A #1 NEW YORK TIMES bestseller and a GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick, THE MAID won the Ned Kelly Award for International Crime Fiction, the Fingerprint Award for Debut Novel of the Year, the Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and the Barry Award for Best First Mystery. THE MAID was also an Edgar Award finalist for Best Novel. Nita lives in Toronto, Canada, in a house that is moderately clean.

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Nellie Bowles’s Failed Provocations

By Molly Fischer

The journalist Nellie Bowles writes a column called “TGIF” for the Free Press, a new media company she started with her wife, Bari Weiss. Both women previously worked at the New York Times : Bowles was a tech reporter, and Weiss was a right-leaning opinion writer and editor before resigning with an open letter lamenting that the paper was now ruled by a “mob” enforcing a “new orthodoxy.” The Free Press styles itself as an antidote to the woke excesses of mainstream institutions, and “TGIF” provides a weekly roundup of headlines on its pet concerns, garnished with Bowles’s jesting commentary. “I’m wearing my old Columbia sweatshirt and a Hamas headband—the look of the season,” one recent installment , covering the protests at her alma mater, begins.

When Joan Didion died , in December, 2021, “TGIF” included a tribute to her influence. Didion had “inspired a generation of young writers including this one” with work that “skewered the trendy movements around her,” Bowles wrote . “The Didion I read would quietly find the flabbiest bits of American culture. She was ruthless and funny. She was not on your side. She wasn’t on anyone’s side. If Didion had been working these past few years, I have no doubt who she’d be writing about.”

With a new book called “ Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History ,” Bowles seems to be making a bid for Didion territory. Her title evokes “On the Morning After the Sixties,” Didion’s 1970 meditation on her fundamental alienation from the previous decade’s idealism. Weiss declared her wife “the lovechild of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion.”

Bowles’s subject in “Morning After the Revolution” is what she variously refers to as “the revolution,” “the movement,” and “the New Progressive”—more or less what Elon Musk would call “the woke-mind virus”—and she presents herself as an apostate of left-wing orthodoxy. “I owe a lot of my life to political progressivism,” she writes, of her evolution. “I bristled at the alternative, which certainly wouldn’t want me.” She volunteers bona fides:

I ran the Gay-Straight Alliance at my high school, and I was the only out gay kid for a while, sticking rainbows all around campus. After college, I fit in well with the Brooklyn Left. I’ve been to a reading of The Nation writers at the Verso Books office, and, my God, I bought a tote. When Hillary Clinton was about to win, I was drinking I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar.

No inveterate outsider à la Didion, she was, if not a fellow-traveller of the revolution, at least a fellow-commuter, generally on board for her cohort’s quotidian habits and conventional wisdom. But she began to harbor doubts about its growing fervor, and the social opprobrium she experienced after meeting Weiss, “a known liberal dissident,” in 2018, exacerbated those doubts. She saw her peers in the media business adopting new jargon and publishing stories that identified potential racism in everything from Alzheimer’s drugs to organic food; she felt that questioning these developments was impermissible. Around 2020—amid the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, and the responses, both cultural and political, that each provoked, including Weiss’s resignation—things, in Bowles’s estimation, “went berserk.” When protesters established a police-free “autonomous zone” in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that summer, she wanted to check it out, but colleagues discouraged her. Her reportorial instincts were being squelched, she felt. (She eventually made it to CHAZ , the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, where she wrote a story on unhappy business owners.) In 2021, she left the Times , and set out to report a forbidden truth—that the left can be somewhat goofy. She writes, in the introduction to “Morning After the Revolution,” “The ideology that came shrieking in would go on to reshape America in some ways that are interesting and even good, and in other ways that are appalling, but mostly in ways that are—I hate to say it—funny.”

No one who remembers the day that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer wore kente-cloth stoles could argue that the past four years have lacked episodes of dazzling absurdity. Periods of social change come with shifting codes of behavior, exposing individual foibles and institutional ineptitude; people caught in the undertow of history flail revealingly. All this has made rich fodder for nonfiction prose since the days when the New Journalism took shape in the sixties and seventies, wielding novelistic detail and authorial subjectivity to capture that era’s tumult. Wolfe, the form’s self-appointed promoter, framed the New Journalism as a project of depicting status—minute gradations of subcultural hierarchy—long before anyone talked about “virtue signalling.” In “Radical Chic,” Wolfe crashes a party at Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue penthouse thrown to benefit the Black Panthers; he describes the nut-covered Roquefort morsels circulated on trays, and also the special frisson of supporting a cause that, guests were warned, might not be tax deductible. His anthropological scrutiny of manners and ritual make the scene indelible.

Didion’s writing on the counterculture circled an apocalyptic dread that lay beyond Wolfe’s status jockeying—but her own unsparing discernment sliced through cliché and attuned her to nuances of style and character. In a withering report on Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, she portrays its founder not as a vacuous-hippie stereotype but as “an interesting girl, who might have interested Henry James,” clad in Irish lace and serenely confident at a county-board meeting as she faces down her irritated neighbors. Didion and Wolfe brought skepticism to writing about their era’s would-be revolutionaries, but they also brought a novelist’s eye for character—a basic interest in understanding why human beings behave the way they do. Their critique rested on an acute perception of their subjects’ particular vanities.

Bowles is going for something similar. “I want you to see the New Progressive from their own perspective, not as a caricature,” she writes, near the beginning of her book. “Morning” starts with the protests in the summer of 2020 and follows a loosely chronological structure. She discusses privilege workshops and puberty blockers, the anti-racism guru Robin DiAngelo and the viral-recipe master Alison Roman, CHAZ in Seattle and the Echo Park homeless encampment in Los Angeles and the progressive former district attorney Chesa Boudin in San Francisco.

It is difficult, though, to see Bowles’s subjects as more than caricatures when her descriptions of them are so generic. She writes that Seattle’s sixtysomething mayor has “hair perfectly blown out into the helmet that’s popular for successful women of that age.” Protesters in their teens and early twenties, meanwhile, possess “that coiled squirrely energy men have then.” At such moments, Bowles is not identifying and describing types; she is gesturing toward them, relying on readers to supply a portrait they already have in mind. Her characterization of emergent activist groups that collected donations and attention in 2020 and 2021 is similarly blank: they are “the flashiest new organizations with the best names and the sharpest websites,” or “cool, flashy nonprofits,” or “trendy groups”; in any case, they have “chic websites.” The incrementalist old-guard organizations have “basic websites.” What constitutes a flashy nonprofit, and, when you visit its Web site, what appears onscreen? Bowles doesn’t say. And “Morning After the Revolution” is a book that involves a good deal of staring at screens. Several set pieces—courses Bowles takes called “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness” and “Foundations of Somatic Abolitionism,” a panel for Times staffers on asexuality, a Columbia event on police abolition, all of which occurred online—amount to summaries of Webinars.

It’s not Bowles’s fault that events in 2020 and 2021 often happened via videoconference. But, for the reader, there is a dispiriting flatness to the results. Imagine “Radical Chic” with no penthouse, no eavesdropping, no combustible social chemistry, no outfits, no Roquefort morsels—just a transcript of unknown people, identified by a first name and maybe a hair style, addressing a group and saying cartoonish things. It’s a truism that humor dwells in specificity, and this principle works against Bowles’s efforts at bitingly observed social commentary. Instead, she resorts frequently to blunt-force sarcasm: according to the media, violent protesters are “good, very good”; according to clinicians, gender-dysphoric teens are “very wise.” She writes, “The movement makes new moral rules so fast that ‘brown-bag lunch’ and ‘trigger warning’ are actually bad now. You’re probably bad.”

You can picture a writer following up with her somatic-abolitionism classmates post-Zoom to discuss whether they have persisted in the practice (it involves humming and swaying), and fleshing out a sketch of who pays for such a class in the first place. But Bowles seems hesitant to engage personally or at length with the revolution’s foot soldiers. The people she speaks with instead tend to be the irritated neighbors, bewildered bystanders, disillusioned allies, proponents of moderate alternatives, and officials with talking points. The voice of the revolution comes from public statements, whether quoted in the media, posted on the Internet, or shouted at protests. The primary voices in a chapter on trans children (“Toddlers Know Who They Are”) are doctors and medical administrators whose quotes seem to come from lectures and videos available online.

Some figures whom Bowles considers (such as Tema Okun, the author of a widely circulated guide to “white supremacy culture”) decline to be interviewed. At demonstrations, protesters regard her warily and sometimes block her view of their activity with umbrellas. Bowles regards this as proving a point—that the revolutionaries are insular and refuse to talk to skeptics—and takes it as an excuse not to change their minds. Her account of a trans-rights protest leans on quoting things yelled by a person Bowles calls “Green Shorts,” who was wearing green shorts and yelling. Didion described herself as “bad at interviewing people”; still, she managed to sustain a level of intimacy with her subjects sufficient to get behind closed doors and see, say, a child on LSD (as in one famous scene in “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem ”). “Writers are always selling somebody out,” Didion warned, but Bowles never gets close enough to expose anything sensitive to public view. You can’t sell out a stranger on the street.

In the absence of such fine-grained scrutiny, Bowles is left rehearsing the conservative commentariat’s greatest hits of left-wing piety run amok—stuff like the “progressive stack,” a method of prioritizing speakers based on their degree of oppression, which has found greater purchase as an anti-woke punching bag than as an actual practice. “It gets messy,” Bowles writes. “Would a white gay guy go ahead of a straight Asian man? Is a trans teenager more oppressed than someone in a wheelchair?” (“Think of the sticky moral quandaries,” the Times columnist Pamela Paul mused last month on the same subject. “Who is more oppressed, an older disabled white veteran or a young gay Latino man? A transgender woman who lived for five decades as a man or a 16-year-old girl?”)

Perhaps, given that Bowles counts herself a former member of the revolution’s social milieu, she’s reasoned that her voice represents it sufficiently. Yet even when discussing her own experiences she can be coy to the point of evasiveness, to the detriment of her credibility. “All the smart people are buying guns,” her chapter on police abolition begins. “That’s what I told myself waiting in line for one.” She never thought that she’d buy a gun, she writes—but she starts hearing about crime in her neighborhood, and then she finds out she’s pregnant. “Almost as soon as I peed on a stick, I got in the car and found myself holding an AR-15, getting a sense of the heft.” Would a shotgun or a pistol be better, she wonders, and where should she put a gun safe? Though she goes on to detail the brand of her home alarm system and the monthly cost of her neighborhood’s private security patrol, she never says what kind of gun she bought, if indeed she bought one.

The early pandemic was a time when countless people were trying to navigate the biggest disruption to American life since the Second World War, and they did it while peering into their phones, where brands, radicals, charlatans, eyewitnesses, experts, and hapless civilians all jumbled together in the same feeds. Bowles is not wrong—it’s funny that there was an interlude when the C.I.A. felt compelled to share a recruiting video touting intersectionality. Indeed, there is an abundance of material within easy reach: corporate lip service to racial justice, viral news stories, videos of lectures and street confrontations, provocations of all sorts on Twitter. Her book raises a question that Wolfe and Didion, working in the sixties and seventies, never had to face. How does a writer make use of such material in a way that takes into account the peculiar perspective—at once vividly proximate and remote—that online detritus affords?

It seems impossible to extricate the revolution that Bowles wants to describe from the context of social media—the realm of cancel-culture callouts, virtue signals, subcultural warrens at once noisy and arcane. (“Twitter has become [the Times ’] ultimate editor,” Weiss wrote in her resignation letter.) But, despite Bowles’s past reporting on tech culture, this isn’t an aspect of the period she ever brings into focus. The book just reflects, unexamined, an experience—hers—of being caught in the online slipstream. “The transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless,” she writes. “The movement simply pivoted: The conversation about racism was now about transphobia. Done! Go!” Maybe this was how it felt scrolling through Instagram at the time; on the page, it reads as incuriosity, even credulity. Surely a book premised on a united and overpowering new movement ought to offer some account of how the people, the institutions, and the ideas it encompasses came into concert. Lacking that, the main thing that B.L.M., pediatric gender clinics, and San Francisco NIMBY s appear to have in common is that they began to vex Bowles around the same time.

In “Morning After the Revolution,” Bowles writes dismissively that her reporting on Silicon Valley for the Times “fit right in” with the Trump-era resistance mind-set that prevailed at the paper. The revolution, she suggests, was happy to look askance at the tech-bro sexism and wacky élite fads that she was then covering. Bowles may feel that she’s moved on to bolder work now, but she found more texture and nuance in her reporting about tech than in anything that appears in her book. The stories she was writing just before the pandemic about screens and human connection have a prescient ambivalence: she conveyed both technology’s power as a lifeline and her own misgivings about what it might portend. But, around the time she remembers the world going berserk, something changed. “Now I have thrown off the shackles of screen-time guilt,” she wrote , in spring of 2020—in retrospect, perhaps a touch ominously. “My television is on. My computer is open. My phone is unlocked, glittering.” ♦

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How Americans Learned to Be Kinder to (Some) Animals

“Our Kindred Creatures” details the rise, and contradictions, of the animal welfare movement.

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By Andrew Graybill

Andrew Graybill is a professor of history at Southern Methodist University. He is writing a book about the Texas longhorn.

OUR KINDRED CREATURES: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

In 2007, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals moistened eyes with TV ads featuring the singer Sarah McLachlan. As her song “Angel” played in the background, viewers were confronted with a parade of despair: images of neglected and abused cats and dogs, some of them grievously injured. “Will you be an angel for a helpless animal?” McLachlan pleaded.

The commercials were a huge success, raising $30 million for the organization despite the fact that many viewers couldn’t bear even to look at them, including McLachlan herself. “It was brutal doing those ads,” she recalled years later. “I can’t watch them. It kills me.”

In their powerful new book, “Our Kindred Creatures,” the journalist Bill Wasik (an editor at The New York Times) and the veterinarian Monica Murphy argue that such compassion for suffering animals was in short supply throughout the United States until an “awakening” in the late 19th century. The authors — who have co-written a previous book about rabies — explain that this movement began in England, where animal welfare commingled with and evolved alongside other moral crusades, including abolitionism. After the end of slavery in the United States, American activists turned their attention to other struggles. The plight of animals during the Gilded Age spoke loudly to some of them.

The stories of two men provide a loose structure to the book. Henry Bergh had his conversion moment while attending a bullfight in Seville. Though appalled by the treatment of the animals, he was no less agitated by what he called “cruelism” — the degrading effect of such violence on spectators, especially children. In 1866 he founded the A.S.P.C.A.

George Thorndike Angell joined the movement around the same time. He launched a monthly publication in 1868 and later established a network of educational clubs. But his most indelible contribution may have been the unauthorized reprinting, in 1890, of “Black Beauty,” an English novel that the authors describe as “the bildungsroman of a working-class horse.” It sold 371,000 copies in the United States in less than a year, drawing comparisons to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s galvanizing antislavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The other main characters in “Our Kindred Creatures” are, appropriately, the animals themselves, whose distress — propagandized by their advocates — bludgeons the modern conscience. Take, for instance, the stray dogs culled from the streets of 19th-century New York City; if unclaimed by 4 p.m. on any given day, they were drowned in a metal crate that could accommodate several dozen in a single dunking. Or the live rabbits once used in medical school classes, their throats flayed open to demonstrate the workings of the nervous system. And the millions of birds harvested annually for their feathers, which adorned the hats of stylish women.

Wasik and Murphy conclude that the awakening reached its apotheosis with the establishment of the nation’s first pet cemetery, in 1896. To their credit, however, the authors do not offer a narrative of simple progress. Rather, they highlight the movement’s internal contradictions. Bergh, who was known to prowl the streets in search of animal abusers, embraced flogging and foot-caning as methods of corporal punishment. Activists like Caroline Earle White, who opposed experimentation on laboratory animals, delayed scientific advances aimed at saving human lives. The taxidermist William Temple Hornaday, alarmed by the near extinction of the bison, traveled west in 1886 to hunt them for display in the Smithsonian, so that future generations might behold the species.

The most striking paradox is that, even as Americans learned to empathize with some of their kindred creatures, they reconciled themselves to the immiseration of others. After all, it was during the post-bellum era that the mechanized slaughter of livestock took off, with Chicago as the industry’s capital city. Its famous (or notorious) stockyards occupied hundreds of acres south of downtown and became a tourist draw during the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Wasik and Murphy are right to say that market forces helped the people clutching copies of “Black Beauty” overcome their aversion to the carnage, whether because of corporate profits or cheap meat. But the cognitive dissonance is astounding all the same.

The authors’ tone is restrained throughout the book but they make a hard — and welcome — pivot in the final chapter. In those pages, they press the case for a “new type of goodness” that would elevate food animals and other mistreated species to the realm of our concern. For skeptics who insist that such a task is too great, Wasik and Murphy counter that “moral change does happen, often at profound scale and remarkable speed.” Let us hope so, for the sake of not just livestock, but all creatures — including humans — suffering in our unfolding environmental catastrophe.

OUR KINDRED CREATURES : How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals | By Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy | Knopf | 450 pp. | $35

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