The Maid by Nita Prose

​   If you like your mysteries cozy and your reading material comforting, this book will suit you like a bespoke maid outfit. It’s a book written to be charming, it positively oozes with strategically dispersed charm and quick and follows a sitcom or a romcom trajectory where no matter how much of a pickle the character finds themselves in, it all works out in the end, quickly, neatly and unrealistically conveniently.
  And Molly the Maid, the appropriately charming and quicky protagonist of this whipped cream concoction, finds herself in quite a pickle indeed. With her beloved grandmother, who has raised her and taught her all about life through a neverending series of embroidery ready aphorisms, gone Molly no longer has anyone to help her navigate life’s challenges and nuances and for Molly those are ever more prevalent since she is somewhere on the spectrum.
   Mind you, this is never directly mentioned in the book (presumably not to bring down the cheery tone with something too lifelike), just like Molly’s OCD is never mentioned by name. She just obsessively cleans, has difficulty reading faces or social cues, etc.
   She also has a peculiar as in very formal way of speaking instilled by her grandmother to compensate for having no former education. Just like Nell (remember that movie?) in a way, albeit considerably more coherent.
   Molly, like her grandmother before her, is a maid and it is Molly’s dream job. She works in a very fancy establishment with names like Regency and Grand in it, but she is barely making ends meet, having squandered away hers and her grandma’s life savings on a wrong man. Wrong men seem to be her type, actually, because this is a romcom, there is, of course, a hunky bartender. There’s also a stock magical older man character who is always there for Molly. All in all, it’s a manageable and orderly life, until she finds a dead body of one of the guests. And then finds herself accused of murder.
   Various comedies of error and numerous misunderstandings later all things get resolved, really in just a few days and tied up ever so neatly with a giant pink bow. Molly learns oodles of valuable lessons and gets a proper love interest and a makeshift family of her own. All nifty and strategically adorable.
    Does t resemble real life in any way? No, not really. This is a book about what life ought to be like and how it ought to work out. This is a fantasy. Would I’ve preferred a book about a person with OCD and spectrum like mentality navigating a murder mystery? Absofreakinglutely. But that would be a different book altogether. The author definitely took the easy and commercially friendly way here (and being an editor for a major publisher she would know these things) and wrote what sells. The movie version can’t be too far off either.
    And that’s fine, the book works, it’s an easy breezy read ideal for a beach or something like that and it reads very quickly. If light is what you’re in the mood for, float away with this, by all means. Thanks Netgalley.