The Maidens

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Accompanying the housekeeper on shopping trips to the crowded and frenetic market in the center of Athens always made Mariana nervous. And she was relieved, and a little surprised, to return home unscathed. Large groups continued to intimidate her as she grew older. At school, she found herself on the sidelines, feeling as if she din't fit in with her classmates. And this feeling of not fitting in was hard to shake. Years later, in therapy, she came to understand that the schoolyard was simply a macrocosm of the family unit: meaning her uneasiness was less about the here and now—less about the schoolyard itself, or the market in Athens, or any other group in which she might find herself—and more to do with the family in which she grew up, and the lonely house she grew up in. Mariana is called to Cambridge when her niece Zoe's closest friend is brutally murdered. Mariana soon realizes that this idyllic campus of higher learning conceals something sinister lurking beneath the surface. The dead girl was a member of The Maidens, a secret society of beautiful female students led by the charismatic Professor Fosca. Mariana immediately suspects Fosca and becomes obsessed with proving his guilt. She must stop him before more innocent lives are lost. it's a power move out of a gothic melodrama, complete with the wilting female victim, and whistling? really? that whole scene is so...silly.

because here's what's not in his personal cache of 'stuff he knows about:' creating believable characters. The setting of Cambridge was extremely vivid. It starts as this beautiful, pristine and exclusive place. Then over the course of the narrative, a dark underbelly becomes exposed as Mariana digs further into the mystery. On the rare occasions she did catch a glimpse into his eyes, there was such disdain there, such burning disappointment. His eyes told her the truth: she wasn’t good enough. No matter how hard she tried, Mariana always sensed she fell short, managing to do or say the wrong thing—just by existing, she seemed to irritate him. He disagreed with her endlessly, no matter what, performing Petruchio to her Kate—if she said it was cold, he said it was hot; if she said it was sunny, he insisted it was raining. But despite his criticism and contrariness, Mariana loved him. He was all she had, and she longed to be worthy of his love. I can see you have cast me as the villain—a predator preying on my vulnerable students. Except now you're met these young ladies, you can see there's nothing vulnerable about them. Nothing untoward happens at these meetings—it's just a small study group, discussing poetry, enjoying wine and intellectual debate." The Prologue introduces Mariana, who is certain that a man named Edward Fosca has murdered two people. She is determined to find a way to prove it.Even as she thought this, she knew it was an impossibility. They weren’t him; they weren’t Sebastian—they weren’t the man she loved and would love forever—they were just a pair of old shoes. Even so, parting with them would be an act of self-harm, like pressing a knife to her arm and slicing off a sliver of skin. That's why when Zoe calls her one night, extremely distraught, Mariana boards a train as soon as she can the next morning; she must go help. Professor Fosca frowned. There was an unmistakable flash of anger in his eyes. He stared at her. "Do you think you can see inside my soul?" In Part IV, Mariana sees Fosca give Morris (the head porter on campus) an envelope, and she follows Morris and sees him have sex with one of the Maidens, Serena. Soon, Serena is found dead as well, and Mariana finds one of the postcards (with the Ancient Greek quotes) under her own door. Even though he knows there are two sides to him all the time, it’s only when he’s done something terrible that the two parts have to separate — since the sane part of him wouldn’t do that — and he feels “split in two”. The “horrible yellow light” comes into play when the run rises in the morning and he realizes what he has done in the light of day.)

the immersion problem is made worse by the frequent insertions of psych-stuff; these clinical asides breaking up the flow: Eerie atmosphere isn’t enough to overcome an unsatisfying plot and sometimes-exasperating protagonist. Was this book perfect? No, but how many of them are, honestly? Yes, it will be too slow of a burn for some readers, especially those expecting a Silent Patient 2.0 type of read, but if you're willing to go into this one with an open mind and a fresh palate, and you enjoy the literary side of crime fiction, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the author's versatility in writing. Here we have a limited third person view, told strictly from Mariana's POV, and this is where I think most of my hesitance in giving the book 5 stars stems from. Third POV has a way of keeping the reader at a distance if we can't experience the story from multiple viewpoints, and I think seeing things play out from various character's experiences would have allowed me to get a little closer to the story and connect on a deeper level to the characters, rather than feeling like we were getting a condensed version of the tale shortened for time's sake. But our meeting with a group of women students called Maidens which is conducted by their narcissistic, flirting professor Edward Fosca took too long! We lost so much time with inner turmoil of heroine: her sadness, grief, her depression etc. Sebastian knows there is a part of him that is calm and sane and a part of him that is bloodthirsty. However, there are two specific mentions of feeling “split in two” and then faced with a “horrible yellow light”, at two separate points in his life. My theory is that this occurs after he has killed someone.Over the past two decades, the bestselling author has been a carer three times: to her father suffering from Parkinson’s, to her widowed mother and presently to her mother-in-law, the exuberant Granny Rosie. Unafraid to depict the exhausting reality of caring, her timely story is compassionate and humane, judiciously blending the personal with the political; as she eloquently argues, “care is a feminist issue”. The Maidens When Zoe reveals that she, too, received a postcard (with the Ancient Greek quotes), Mariana decides it's time for them to get out of Cambridge. Before they head out, Zoe insists on fetching a knife from the ceremony (which she suspects was used in the murders) so they have it as evidence. In the space of just a year, which once would have slipped by almost imperceptibly—and now stretched out behind her like a desolate landscape flattened by a hurricane—the life she had known had been obliterated, leaving Mariana here: thirty-six years old, alone and drunk on a Sunday night; clutching a dead man’s shoes as if they were holy relics—which, in a way, they were. Those troubling aspects aside, from a fundamental development level, the plot never felt fully fleshed out and the characters felt like caricatures. The characters were monstrously overworked yet somehow super forgettable. I had trouble remembering each male character and often forget about them until Mariana ran into them and they gave her creepy serial killer vibes all over again. Seemingly every man introduced seemed to scream I AM A CREEP, SUSPECT ME. They all make her uncomfortable, they're all trying too hard to be close to her, several actually STALK her (which we never discuss???), and yet somehow we're to believe Mariana has got this all handled and has no concerns over all the suspicious men circling her. Honestly, the ploy to make them all red herrings was so obvious it was cringey. Zoe never really felt like her own character, rather it felt like her purpose was just to be a convenient person for Mariana to walk around campus with and sometimes talk to instead of trying to 'solve' the crime through her own rambling internal monologues. In "The Silent Patient", artist Alicia Berenson stopped speaking after shooting her husband in the face 5 times. Her only explanation, a self portrait, titled Alcestis-after the tragic heroine of the Greek Tragedy, by Euripides.