Dark Academia and Terrible Characters - my review of The Maidens

Jul 15, 2021
3 min read

Hello everyone, and happy Thursday! I am back today with another book review, one that I have been planning to write for a little while.

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides is a dark academia thriller that takes place in Cambridge University. The novel follows Mariana who, after a frantic phone call from her niece, finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation. A female student was found dead, and Mariana's main suspect is Edward Fosca, a charismatic university professor, and leader of a secret society, whose members, who are all women, call themselves The Maidens.

I never usually read thrillers, which is surprising considering how much I like police tv shows, and how much I enjoy the few thrillers I happen to read.

I have such mixed thoughts about this book, it was such an easy read, and I was engaged for the entirety of it, which is good for a thriller, but, as I will explain later, I was extremely disappointed in the ending.

All the characters are horrible?

The one thing that bothered me the most is that fact that all of the characters in this book are horrible. Either they are just plain terrbile people, or they are just boring and I could not really care about them.

Mariana could have been an very good main character. She is a psychologist, who specializes in group therapy, and as such, I feel like she could have had an interesting outlook on the case. I would have loved to se her use her knowledge of psychology to think about the case, the secret society and the way the Maidens behaved, or even to investigate the different suspects. Instead, her background in psychology seems to be something mentioned here and there, but to be completely honest, she could have been a baker and it would not have changed the plot of the novel.

Beyond that, let's talk about the male characters. All of them range for creepy to completely sociopathic. After a while, I was really starting to think that the author hated men for some reason. While reading, I was with a friend who wanted to know the plot - she does not reall ylike thrillers but she likes it when I tell her what happens in my books. As I explained what was happening, I told her every time one of the men was being creepy towards Mariane. After a while she got confused because there were so many of them, which shows how many of them were crazy. Even the one man she ends up getting along with has very questionable behaviour towards her. Overall, the characters were a mess, and not one of them was one you could root for.

A disappointing ending

As I have said before, I was pretty engaged throughout the novel. I might have not enjoyed the characters all that much, but the writing style was very pleasant, and I could really see myself walking around Cambridge University - and let's be honest, I am a sucker for dark academia and everything that takes place in a beautiful university will be a yes from yes.

I loved reading this book, and was really trying to see where it would go. So much so, that about 50 pages before the end, I still had no idea who the killer was. This could only mean two things: either the twist would be incredible, or it would be terrible. And with only 50 pages left, I slowly started to lose hope.

The ending had a twist alright, so much so in fact, that it made absolutely no sense. Either I missed some clues throughout the novel that led to that ending, or the twist really came out of nowhere. In my opinion, it is the latter, and while I am all for a shocking reveal, 50 pages for such a big twist, with no foreshadowing, was a big let-down.

I will not be spoiling anything on here, but if you decide to read this book, be prepared to be disappointed by this ending.

I did end up giving this book 3.5 stars, mainly because I enjoyed the experience of reading it and the narrative style. If you have read this book, I would love to hear your thoughts - and maybe scream about that terrible ending with you. In any case, I would love to hear from you, so you can find me on Instagram to share your thoughts!