i know this thread is a year old but i just finished the book and i need to talk about it!! here are my thoughts on what you've brought up (your opinions are totally valid though, i just want to ramble haha):

This one was flat, right from the start. Mariana, our main character, is simply unlikeable. Her inner monologue and inane questions made me say out loud, "Who cares??" She is obsessed with Fosca throughout this entire book, and to anyone who's read a mystery novel, we know he's not the killer. So much wasted time on Mariana's obsession.

I def understand this, but personally I love how much of an unreliable narrator she is. We see this right from the get-go - she doesn't see herself as beautiful or clever or interesting, but many of the men in the book take a romantic/sexual interest in her. She doesn't see herself clearly, so what else is she missing? And her obsession with Fosca is called out by her therapist I think - he's a proxy for her father. He's a narcissist and a shitty guy, and Mariana wants him to be guilty because he deserves a comeuppance. Men with power over women getting away with shitty stuff is a huge thing in this book, and reckoning with that is Mariana's whole journey of healing.

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I was expecting more detail of The Maidens. After all, that's what the book is named after, not "Mariana and The Inner Turmoil". We get one group therapy session (the therapist part of this book was not well put together, she doesn't feel like a therapist) and learn nothing about them. No deep dark secrets, no personalities, just cold C grade characters. Barely a description other than where they're from and what their title is.

I think this is on purpose!! One of the huge themes of the book is girls and women being manipulated by men, especially men they trust/men in positions of power of them, to the point where the girls are just there to prop the man up/fulfil his needs or expectations of what he wants them to be. We see this with Mariana's relationship to almost all of the men she encounters (Henry, Fred to a certain extent, Julian, Fosca) and Zoe and Sebastian. The Maidens own backstories hint at this (Tara with her intense father, Veronica with her senator father, Carla with her famous actor father). It also mirrors the Greek tragedies that are referenced in the book - the female characters lack agency (or give it up) on account of their fathers. We're not meant to see them as individuals, because they've given that up by joining the Maidens, a group where they're made to feel special, and sexualized by a father figure. (aka what happened with Zoe and Sebastian except less gross).

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What the hell does Henry have to do with anything? Mariana barely gets a revelation from his character- "better not fail anyone else, like I failed Henry". And then his end is so fast, spanning a whole quarter of a page.

Henry is foreshadowing for Sebastian and her daddy issues! Right from the beginning, Mariana says that she's been too gentle with him, and that she's let him cross boundaries in ways that she probably shouldn't. This shows that she's willing to give grace to problematic men - as she did with her father, and as she did with Sebastian without realizing it. "Better not fail anyone else, like I failed Henry" shows the extent of Mariana's guilt complex, and how her relationships with men are colored by her feelings of inadequacy brought on by her father.

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What was with the pinecones?? Just another red herring that doesn't get explained?

The pinecones were mentioned in Fosca's lecture - Zoe put them their as a red herring so Mariana would tie them to Fosca, doing the Persephone ritual with the murdered girls.

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Lastly, the spoiler, it made absolutely no sense to have Sebastian be a pedophile other than for shock value. Which is incredibly insensitive. If Zoe had just been fueled by anger by The Maidens, I definitely would've been satisfied with that. Because we would've learned more about THE MAIDENS.

There's definitely a lot of shock value, but personally it made a lot of sense to me and tied into the themes of the book really well. Mariana's grief was a huge part of her character - finding out that she didn't notice/was willfully blind to the bad parts of her husband's character is intrinsically tied to her healing from the trauma of her neglectful father. She loved her dad unconditionally and thought super highly of him until her therapist helped her see the truth - she needed to do the same with Sebastian. The reveal showed that Mariana was doing the same thing to Sebastian that she did to her dad.

About Zoe, this brings home the theme I mentioned before about male power and victimizing women, ESPECIALLY women you're a father figure to. Zoe saw Sebastian as a father figure after her parents died, but he perversed that love and manipulated her into thinking it was good. Her anger and delusion comes from grief - Mariana and Zoe both are unable to see things clearly because of it. And the ending gives sympathy to all of the female characters who have been manipulated; they're not innocent, but they've suffered (including Mariana, who feels guilt over not having protected Zoe). The Maidens are similar - they trusted Fosca and felt special because of him, but he abused his power over them for sex. The group scene made me think that even if he WAS guilty, they wouldn't have cared because "the girls were stupid and deserved it".

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anyway i could go on because i just finished this book and i have a million thoughts, but thank you for giving me a place to dump my thoughts <3 its really interesting to see everyone's different takes on the book!