I read The Maidens by Alex Michaelides few years back and I liked the book at that time. It wasn’t better than Silent Patient but it was a better thriller than many other thrillers which are rated highly. Today on Goodreads I saw the ratings and it was very bad. Whats the reason? Is it just because of the comparison with the previous book?
by Alternative-Bit-999
6 Comments
I don’t know what it is with this book, people either love it or hate it. For me it was one of the worst books I read last year. Weak plot, weird characters, plot holes, and as a whole it felt as a first draft that no editor even saw before it went to print. So I get the low ratings, but I sometimes feel there are two editions of this book and half of us got the wrong/pre-edited one.
I DNF’d this book after telling anyone who would listen that The Silent Patient was awesome. I could not get into it or care and gave up 40% in.
I didn’t like any of the characters (they all felt flat and boring and quite frankly a little bit dumb) and the plot was just ridiculous. I didn’t like The Silent Patient either but it at least wasn’t as ridiculously bad as The Maidens.
I’m just giving up on Michaelides at this point. His writing style clearly isn’t for me.
I read The Silent Patient before reading The Maidens. My feeling is that The Maidens is more of the same I’ve seen on TSP. Also, the endind… >!was very Scooby-doo-ish for me. The vilain explaining the whole plan… that’s just lazy writing!<
I thought this book was godawful. There were so many wild red herrings that disappeared without a trace once the killer was revealed (another twist that didn’t make a lot of sense.) The protagonist was also dumb as hell — it’s clear the author didn’t know much about psychology and therapy because of how he wrote her.
The main character was a complete moron who foreshadowed her every move to the people she suspected of being dodgy. All the male characters were shady af to create as many red herrings as possible.