Book Summary: The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
“Welcome to the family,” Nina Winchester says as I shake her elegant, manicured hand. I smile politely, gazing around the marble hallway. Working here is my last chance to start fresh. I can pretend to be whoever I like. But I’ll soon learn that the Winchesters’ secrets are far more dangerous than my own…
Every day I clean the Winchesters’ beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor.
I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew’s handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it’s hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina’s life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband.
I only try on one of Nina’s pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it’s like. But she soon finds out… and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it’s far too late.
But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don’t know who I really am.
They don’t know what I’m capable of…
Book Review: The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
The Housemaid by Freida McFadden is a deliciously twisty psychological thriller that will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the very last page. McFadden weaves an intricate web of secrets, lies, and deadly obsession that slowly tightens around her characters as the story unfolds. This compulsively readable novel explores the intoxicating pull of envy, the corrosive effects of privilege, and the dangerous depths people will go to in order to attain what they desire most.
The story opens from the perspective of a young woman named Millie, who has just been hired as a live-in housekeeper for the affluent Winchester family. From the first pages, it’s clear that Millie is not being entirely truthful about her past – she seems to be running from something, and sees this new job as a chance to start over and “pretend to be whoever she likes.” Her new employers, Nina and Andrew Winchester, appear to be the picture of marital bliss and success, residing in a beautiful marble home. However, barely concealed cracks in their idyllic facade quickly begin to show as Millie settles into her position.
Nina is controlling and particular, making messes just to watch Millie clean them up. She spins strange lies about her daughter Cecelia and seems to take perverse pleasure in berating her new housekeeper. Meanwhile, Andrew is kind but withdrawn, his handsome features marred by an air of sadness that Millie finds herself irresistibly drawn to. As she observes the dysfunction behind the Winchesters’ glamorous lifestyle, Millie develops an unsettling fascination with Nina’s wardrobe, her home, and her husband. The longing gazes she casts at Andrew escalate into an outright obsession that culminates in Millie trying on one of Nina’s pristine white dresses – a violation that proves to have devastating consequences.
McFadden is a true master at steadily ramping up the tension through exquisite detail and an ever-thickening atmosphere of dread. What seems like an ordinary arrangement – a wealthy family hiring household staff – is gradually revealed to be anything but through the author’s deft handling of perspective shifts and calculated reveals. Just when you think you have a grip on the motivations and dynamics at play, the ground shifts underneath you.
The book’s second half is where McFadden really flexes her skills as a psychological thriller writer. Millie’s attic bedroom door turns out to be lockable only from the outside, and she finds herself imprisoned under increasingly nightmarish conditions by a sadistic and unhinged Andrew. The reader is dragged through Millie’s harrowing captivity and torture, breathlessly turning pages to try to discern how she will possibly escape her living hell. Meanwhile, Nina’s perspective is slowly untangled through interspersed chapters, unveiling the shocking truth that she was the one who orchestrated Millie’s plight with the hopes that she would dispatch her cruel husband.
With whiplash-inducing twists and turns, the author lays bare the inner workings of the Winchester’s deeply dysfunctional marriage and how years of abuse and manipulation have twisted them into the monsters they’ve become. The explosive finale will leave readers shaken as the fates of Millie, Andrew, and Nina are agonizingly and explosively sealed.
One of the book’s great strengths is McFadden’s adept handling of her deplorable yet utterly human characters. As much as the reader may recoil from their actions, the author renders the motivations of Nina, Andrew and Millie uncomfortably relatable and understandable within the frameworks of their respective traumas and skewed psychologies. We understand why Nina feels both hatred and fealty towards her husband; why Andrew’s depravity and coercive control spiral so poisonously; and why Millie’s obsession leads her to seek out the very circumstances that nearly destroy her. Their wildly divergent perspectives intertwine with gut-punching plausibility.
McFadden is also a master of sensory detail and visceral, immersive description. She richly renders the Winchesters’ luxurious home and lifestyle in luscious terms, luring the reader into Millie’s developing covetousness alongside her. In the book’s more horrific moments, McFadden wields those same descriptive powers to discomfiting effect, shoving the reader face-first into Millie’s malodorous confinement and the misery inflicted upon her. You can practically feel the sting of the pepper spray and smell the stench.
While The Housemaid is a master class in psychological suspense, it isn’t quite a perfect novel. The ending feels a touch too abrupt, wrapping up some key threads a bit too neatly and conveniently for the level of depravity exhibited. And while Cecelia’s character is written as appropriately childlike, her dialogue and actions veer into excessive cutesiness at times in a way that feels at odds with the book’s stark tone.
Those are relatively minor quibbles, however, in the face of what is otherwise a superbly crafted, utterly engrossing and deliriously twisty thriller. McFadden has penned a deranged domestic nightmare that burrows under your skin and doesn’t let go even after you’ve put the book down. The depths of the human psyche’s darkness that The Housemaid plumbs is profoundly unsettling – the final piece of domestic fiction in a long time that has truly disturbed me.
Packed with jaw-dropping surprises, unrelenting tension and exquisitely rendered characters, The Housemaid is a brooding and oppressive reading experience in the vein of novels like You by Caroline Kepnes and The Push by Ashley Audrain. Through her unflinching examination of the precarious balance between envy and obsession, privilege and abuse, Freida McFadden has crafted a diabolically gripping masterwork of psychological suspense. Brace yourself for this one – it’s going to knock you off your feet.
