The Maid’s Version

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Manufacturer: Daniel Woodrell
Brand: Mystery, Historical Fiction
Brew: Paperback
Steeping Time: 192 pages
Tea Service: Personal Choice
Strength:

Synopsis: Alma DeGeer Dunahew, the mother of three young boys, works as the maid for a prominent family in West Table, Missouri. Her husband is mostly absent, and in 1929 her scandalous, beloved younger sister is one of the forty-two killed in an explosion at the local dance hall. Who is to blame? Or could it have been a colossal accident?
Alma thinks she knows the answer – and that its roots lie in a dangerous love affair. Her dogged pursuit of justice makes her an outcast and causes a long-standing rift with her son. By telling her story to her grandson, she finally gains some solace – and peace for her sister. He is advised, ‘Tell it. Go on and tell it” – tell the story of his family’s struggles, suspicions, secrets, and triumphs.

Alma is an old woman when we first meet her.

She is seen as a little crazy, a little odd. She’s rough around the edges, but that’s what makes her easy to love. Throughout the book, we see the tragedies that lay blow after blow upon her, and we understand how she got to where she is at the beginning of the book.

Set in a small town in Missouri, the book takes us from one person to the next, giving us a deeper look at what life was like, from rich to poor, in this close-knit town. I was very excited to read this book, as I’m all about a good mystery, but unfortunately, The Maid’s Version fell a little short of the mark.

I really struggled with the rating on this one.

It’s books like The Maid’s Version that made me want to skip a rating system altogether. Admittedly, I’m a terrible critic. I can usually find something good in anything I read or watch, and this book is no different. I rather enjoyed the actual story being told. It was following it that was the hard part.

I don’t really know where to begin. The Maid’s Version feels rather disjointed, and subsequently, I feel my review will be the same. I generally assume that books I struggle with are simply books I’m not ‘smart enough’ for. I felt that way for a good 60% of this book. The narrative jumps from person to person, and usually, that person only gets one chapter.

Many of the people are victims of the explosion, and I enjoyed getting a little backstory on each of them, but it’s really confusing. It made it difficult to keep track of the ‘main’ characters in the book because there were so many faces coming and going in quick succession. On the one hand, I really like that. It’s like black and white photos flashing through my mind with tidbits of history attached. On the other hand, it’s so disjointed that I can’t remember any of them and they truly are just a flash, quickly forgotten.

The layout is not a linear one, and as the chapters jump from one citizen to another, and sometimes back again, we also jump to different years in a completely random order.

Not only is the timeline hard to follow, but the text can also be quite confusing. There were multiple instances where I’d read the same sentence over and over, trying to make sense of the words in front of me. Eventually, I’d give up and move on. It immediately took me out of the story and into a very frustrating real-world environment.

I also struggled to keep names straight. Alma has three sons and a husband, and more than halfway through the book, I was still guessing when a name came up. There wasn’t enough time to focus on one individual person, so none of them made a full impression in my mind. I had them all straight by the end, but it would have been useful throughout the entire book.

For those reasons, I struggled with rating it two or three cuppas. In the end, I settled on three with the sole reason being that I truly did enjoy the overall story. If it hadn’t been for the story of the explosion and the speculation as to who caused it, I might have even given this book one cuppa.

Overall, I thought the mystery of the explosion was a neat story, but I don’t think I’ll be recommending The Maid’s Version to many people in the future. It just wasn’t the book for me.

Have you read The Maid’s Version? Leave a comment and let me know what you thought about it! Want to read it for yourself? Click here to get a copy of your own.
Cheers,
Lydia