Hello! I have some stuff to do over at my cross stitch blog, so I'm not going to write too much here today, but on Friday, I finished reading Maid for Me by Kat Lieu, which was a book too bizarre to just be ignored. Usually, I say that I don't know what to expect when I download a free Kindle book, but in the case of Maid for Me, that was only partially true. Both the cover and the description made it seem very anime-influenced, though the description made it sound like a cute and fluffy romantic comedy, and the cover, which showed an anime girl in her relatively conservative underwear standing next to a maid's uniform, made it seem a little like the kind of anime where a girl spends 26 episodes dropping things and bends over to pick them up a dozen times an episode. The book was free, so I figured that if it ended up being the latter, I'd figure it out within 10 pages and delete it with no risks taken.
Luckily, Maid for Me ended up being more of a romantic comedy type of story, though, in terms of anime, it was more like one of the weird OAVs that used to cost 3 dollars from the Right Stuf Bargain Bin than it was like the sort of series where people can stand around for 50 episodes and still not know who they want to go out with. It has a resilient leading lady with an improbable, but appropriately tragic back story, a pile of boys who think she's really fabulous despite her beaten-into-your-head lack of self-confidence, gambling, threats of bizarre ritualistic violence, and local politicians. It wasn't my favorite thing that I've read this year by a long shot, and I was irrationally bothered by a couple of comma errors that I found, but it was enthusiastically executed, self-referential, and, while it lasted, entertaining, if nothing else. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to someone that didn't like anime, but, as a person who finished it and then though about how long it had been since I'd watched my VHS of Assemble Insert, it didn't seem like a wasted hour. If you'd also like to read Maid for Me, it's currently available on Amazon.com as both an eBook and a paperback, though currently, the eBook is 99 cents rather than free. It's really short and incredibly strange, and as someone who didn't despise the book or have a violently positive reaction to it, I think I'm in the minority, but if you think it sounds interesting, you may end up liking it.
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