Review: Bog standard.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 15, 2012
Sara Dunbar, <strong>Home Maid</strong> (Amazon Digital Services, 2011)A little dalliance with the hired help is okay as long as the hired help starts it, right? I'm usually willing to go along for the ride, though I prefer stories where everyone involved knows what's going on, as long as the author presents a convincing case with halfway-decently-drawn characters and a mildly realistic setup. Dunbar gets us partway to the former--there's a bit of description beyond the porn-usual, but not much--but the latter? There's a thin line, perhaps the thinnest in all of writing, between the archetype and the stereotype. While most writers at least instinctively understand this where characters are concerned (even if many of them simply ignore it, as Dubar does with her petite blonde housemaid), it's not as common knowledge, I guess, that the same applies to settings. It should be. How many times have you read an author who uses the cliché of the motel-room painting, and then has the narrating character mention that it's a cliché? And yet it's still endemic. I long to tie this in to the cheap, reusable sets in porn films, but that's a subject for another essay. And, of course, the situation is dead generic. Give me a part 2 where the wife comes home and jumps into the sack with the maid behind hubby's back and we've got the makings of a sex comedy (as long as the wife isn't preternaturally beautiful), but at the moment, it's just kind of tiresome. **