Matthew
As a fan of the series, with the first book being one of my favourite books ever, this final book was greatly disappointing. I wasn't going to write a review, but my dad encouraged me to write one due to my verbal reactions during my reading of The Maid's Secret.
The novel is split into two stories. The present-day story, Molly's story, is about Molly finding out one of her items at home is worth millions, but is later stolen. Who did the stoling? Flora's story is the story of Molly's grandmother, Flora Gray, revealed through her diary, where we learn how she met Preston, was raised, and more. Every odd-numbered chapter is a chapter of Molly's story; every even-numbered chapter is a chapter of Flora's story.
Molly's Story
Molly's story feels like an afterthought. The mystery isn't engaging due to the lackluster number of suspects and the stakes not being all that interesting. There aren't layers of things going on in the mystery. For example, Mystery Guest had multiple characters with odd behaviours, doing odd things, opportunists that weren't involved in the crime, etc.; here, there's nothing like that, it's very boring. It makes the overall mystery underwhelming.
Not helping the mystery is the pacing, as it takes a little over 1/3 of the book to reach the crime. The first third becoming off as filler with the plot line of Molly being rich/popular only scratching the surface level, without delving too deeply into any of its interesting themes (ex. Stalking, paranoia, being seen differently, etc.).
Even the characters are a downgrade, as apart from Angela, none of them stood out, developed, or did anything super interesting; some are just under-utilized like Sunshine, Sunitha, & Lily. Molly is the biggest offender, an amazing character in the previous books, here she lacks the charm she had before and feels stilted. Her and the cast have their moments, but they lack the consistency of charm from prior books. There's nothing here that screams “we needed to see this” outside of the final chapter, which should've just been in Mistletoe Mystery to begin with.
I love Molly a lot as a character, and I'm not against Molly being in a non-murder story, I adore Mistletoe Mystery (despite the egregious pricing), but her story was just a slog to read this time.
Flora's Story
On one hand, I think the parallels to Molly's journey in the first book is an awesome idea. Both were abandoned by their parents, had a mother & father figure in others (Preston & Flora for Molly, Mrs. Mead & Uncle Willy for Flora), both fell for someone who was a bad apple, and both suffered bullying (Flora for her gender, Molly for her neurodivergence being seen as weird). In a way, we see that Molly & Flora weren't so different; but also the differences, where while Molly was raised to be kind, Flora was originally mean but humbled into kindness.
The problem is that Flora's story doesn't succeed where The Maid succeeds. In The Maid, Molly is an engaging character and the story plays into that by making the fact she's being manipulated obvious to the reader, but having why Molly doesn't catch on to being manipulated being insanely interesting since we saw in her mind how she misinterprets things.
Flora in her story isn't an interesting character, and her story overall feels generic and predictable. Flora fails to see the red flags because it's the first time she ever has fallen in love, which is realistic, but it's something I've seen so many times before with nothing interesting added to the mix. I like what the romance was trying to do, it's a very important message for young adults to learn, which makes me sad it wasn't executed better.
Additionally, unlike Mystery Guest where the story from the past foreshadowed the present story and gave clues, Flora's story has clues for the modern-day story (Molly's story), but... It just felt sloppy, since the clues felt like stretches.
Furthermore, Flora's story feels redundant, as we got the gist of Flora's past in the previous books. While this goes into more detail of her life, it doesn't reveal anything all that shocking that we didn't already know/could assume with an educated guess.
Flora's story was fantastic in concept, but the execution fell flat.
Two Stories At Once
The last thing I'll bring up is that I really dislike the gimmick of having two stories play out at once. I didn't like it in Mystery Guest, and I especially didn't like it here. That being two reasons, the first reason being because it messes with the flow of each story. It's not fun trying to get invested in a story only to get interrupted by another story. And when one story finally picks up steam, it's halted at the end of the chapter to focus on the other story. There are ways to execute this well, but the back-and-forth combined with Molly's story having shorter chapters than Flora's story just doesn't make it balanced at all.
Speaking of, the second reason is that Molly's story simply doesn't feel like the A-plot, but rather the B-plot; especially when you compare the length of Flora's story & chapter length, it makes Molly's story feel like a short-story shoved in as opposed to nestling in organically.
Conclusion
My only takeaway from The Maid's Secret is that the Molly the Maid series shouldn't have been a series at all beyond the first book. That's not to say Maid's Secret ruined the series for me, more-so since this is the final book in the series, it has made me look back on the series overall and realize the characters/story never grew substantially in a way that felt necessary beyond the first book.
And while the other books are very fun to read despite that, The Maid's Secret simply felt like a pointless addition to the series, adding nothing and being a major slog to read through. I hate to be so critical on an entry in this series, but Thea Maid's Secret really was that bad in my eyes.
Sometimes just because fans want to see more, doesn't mean there has to be more. I'll read more of Nita Prose's works in the future, but I'll be keeping that last part in mind.
I love the premise, especially with Janet in the lead (being my favourite Avenger), but the execution falls flat hard.
The mysteries are interesting, yet lack clues for the reader to draw to a conclusion. Culprits are never brought up until they are figured out, and while I love Janet, she never feels as though she struggles with the mysteries. The murder mystery aspect is just not good and desperately needed to be lengthened to multiple chapters, not just one chapter each.
The main story also gets ignored until the final two chapters, so that mystery just lingers ignored for a good portion of the comic. Unfortunately, due to being cancelled, the climax feels rushed.
There are genuinely good aspects though. Janet is fun and some of the heroes we see throughout are really neat (especially Moon Knight). The art is really nice too.
Overall, I hope something like this is done again in the future, but with the pacing it needs to really shine.
These short stories are just filled to the brim with such consistently horrible decision-making. To the point where there's one for each chapter... I don't know if that should be impressive or not. O_O
Apart from the Rib Lady short story, nothing really creeped me out, scared me, or interested me. It was more silly than anything else, especially Lovesickness and how over the top it got. Which could've been fun, but the silliness was too inconsistent, so it was mostly boring. Art was 10/10 though.
This is a book that's easy to not take seriously, as pornography in general has the perception of being both taboo and with paper-thin plots... A lot of which involve pizza-delivery men. Especially Japanese pornography in the form of ero-manga/hentai with a reputation for being extremely weird. And yeah, when I saw Hoopla individually suggest this to me after reading a book on the history of British Computers, I laughed hard that Hoopla would suggest something like this.
However, I went in with a serious mindset and was very pleasantly surprised. This is less a straightforward history of ero-manga and more of a history of several expressions used in ero-manga, such as the aheago, breasts, censorship methods for genitalia, the infamous tentacles, and more.
For example, part of the reason some use tentacles, even in Japanese Adult Films, is because media in Japan can't depict intercourse between a penis and a vagina unless it's educational. However, tentacles are neither, so they don't have to be censored.
The book does a great job going into each expression, its history, interviewing prevalent talents in the field of ero-manga, and using visuals from ero-manga & relevant materials to showcase what the author is describing. It covers the subject matter of ero-manga very well and I learned a lot I never knew about before.
The book itself is written academically, so it's very dry, but I prefer it that way. I feel if the author poked fun at the subject or tried their hand at humour, it'd weaken their arguments and hinder their ultimate goal: for ero-manga to be seen in an academic light.
Not to say this book isn't without flaws. This book desperately needed a content warning. I know that might be obvious, but I wasn't prepared for the casual mention of non-consent, nor the visual displays of tentacles and lolicon stuff (young looking girls). I skipped most of the tentacle section because I genuinely got uncomfortable from all the imagery under the context of non-consent.
I also would've liked to see more of the Boy's Love sort of thing, as I don't explore that scene myself and wanted to know about that side's expressions. Instead, the book largely focuses on expressions that appeal to male readers, which I thought was a shame.
Still, it was a great read and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject matter. Just don't be afraid to skip any sections if you're uncomfortable.