The Housemaid (The Housemaid #1)

The Housemaid is one of those books that has been on my “to-read” pile for a long time but some particularly negative reviews on Goodreads kept me from pulling the trigger. With the recent glowing review a Youtuber I follow gave it however, I decided to finally give it a shot and I think I really need to start ignoring Goodreads altogether.

The story starts off quickly, the longest chapter in the entire book is maybe a 10min read long and so it was very easy for me to fall into a “just one more chapter” mindset as they consistently only added another 3-6min to my reading time. Despite it being obvious extraordinarily early that something was wrong about the house Millie was working in, the tension of it never reaches a point where it becomes boring or repetitive and I think the chapter length has a lot to do with that.

It’s also a good thing that no plot point ever overstays its welcome as the story overall is fairly predictable. Nina is set up as this big bad guy with mental issues but I took note rather quickly that this would probably be a red herring and it was because, surprise surprise, her husband Andrew was the psycho all along. That is not to say that I wasn’t invested though. In fact, I really enjoyed the half romance building up between Millie and Andrew and I’m honestly a bit gutted that this isn’t really a romance story because they were cute together and on some level I was even rooting for them even if it came at the cost of Andrew cheating on Nina.

I also really felt something for all characters as I found each of the main trio to have convincing depth. I felt sorry for Millie and her working situation but I also found myself annoyed at her constant judgement of Nina on superficial stupid points like whether she dyed her hair enough. I got annoyed at Nina for her unfair treatment of Millie which she even justifies by pointing out Millie’s criminal past and yet I also empathised profoundly with her focus on surviving through her life of abuse with Andrew. I hated Andrew for his deranged treatment of his wives’ but I also felt for his disappointment at having children with Nina.

Some of that depth and nuance is however lost as the book starts revealing its twists. The obfuscation of these twists and their own lack of subtlety is what put me on their track to begin with as it is really hammered in that Nina tried drowning her daughter, so much so that I got suspicious of that story which turned out to be fake. When Andrew’s abusive behaviour is revealed it also feels like it’s being laid on a bit too thick. He is in some ways also a victim of abuse by his mother which he replicates on his wives, but one of his tactics is to keep peanut butter around the house which Nina’s daughter is allergic to and secretly adds to some meals just to keep Nina in check and that’s maybe a bit too cartoonishly evil.

Speaking of Andrew’s mother, she turns out to be glad that her son died because she thinks Nina killed him in the same way she used to punish him so clearly he just didn’t grow up a good enough boy and deserved to die and that’s just weird and unnecessary as that dialogue relied on Andrew’s mother finding out about the circumstances of his death which the author shoe horned in. And again, speaking of shoe horned in, Andrew had another wife before he was with Nina, she’s mentioned a couple times but never appears and never really matters until Andrew is killed and through the power of a big massive Deus Ex Machina, the detective leading the investigation into his death is the father of that ex wife and he shadily closes the investigation to let Nina and Millie get off scot free because he hasn’t forgiven Andrew for what he did to his daughter. That is not to say I don’t understand the detective’s motivations, I simply do not buy into how convenient it is that the detective happens to be the father of a traumatised ex bride of Andrew.

Speaking of trauma (wow I really get to chain these things seemingly), whilst Andrew’s ex wife is traumatised and has never been with another man since (as the detective mentions), Nina immediately jumps into bed with Enzo, their gardener who helps her escape and even tries to immediately plan out a new life with him and again I don’t buy that, she should have severe trust issues and deep trauma around being with any man after that experience. Instead the author shoe horns this awkward forced romance that was also completely unnecessary and has no pay out.

Finally there’s Millie. The Goodreads reviews were particularly annoyed at Millie’s seemingly poor judgement, ignoring red flags and making bad decisions. However, Millie is a 27 year old who has been in jail since she was 17. She hasn’t been with anyone romantically, has no friends outside of prison, she is homeless and can barely afford food. So when she gets that job at the Winchesters, she doesn’t choose to ignore the red flags, she simply has no choice, it’s this sketchy job or slowly starving. She doesn’t make bad decisions about her relationship with Andrew because she’s stupid, she’s a 17 year old who was robbed of emotional growth by 10 years in jail. So when Andrew shows up and is being incredibly pleasant, respectful and seemingly perfect she falls for him and I find that perfectly believable. It becomes a bit less believable at the end however when it is revealed that as a child she was sexually harassed by a teacher, as a teenager she killed a rapist, as a recently out of jail waitress she got sexually assaulted by a coworker and now as a maid she got abused by her new boyfriend, it’s such an incredibly string of bad luck that I find it a bit hard to see it as anything else than an inelegant commentary on how being a woman in the modern world is fundamentally unsafe (messaging I agree with but not with the form here). It all ends in an epilogue revealing that Millie found her career in now being essentially a contract killer for wives in abusive relationships and that’s just ridiculous.

I still had a good time overall and I wouldn’t say the ending spoils the rest of the story in any way as the resolution around Nina and Andrew’s relationship gets a satisfying ending, but the lack of elegance and subtlety at the end makes it all a bit worse than it should be.