The Maid and the Crocodile

Jordan Ifueko
Completed 7/13/2025, Reviewed 7/14/2025
5 stars

This side story to the Raybearer duology blew me away.  I was rather shocked because it is very prosy, spending a lot of time in the main character’s head thinking and reflecting.  While it seems like that would be rather boring, it somehow was action packed and full of great dialogue.  I found it much more engaging than the duology, even though I didn’t remember the world building all that much.  It’s advertised as being standalone and it was.  I was completely drawn into this book’s world building and the plight of this orphan struggling between listening to the inner voice that says keep to your station and an external voice telling her she could move mountains.  This book is nominated for the 2025 Lodestone Award at the Hugos and stands far above the others I’ve read so far.  This may be the one to beat.

Small Sade (pronounce SHAH-DAY like the 90’s singer) leaves the orphanage at the age of seventeen.  She takes her broom to help advertise herself as a maid at the town market.  She has vitiligo and a lame foot, requiring a cane to walk.  But she is also a Curse Eater.  She can clean a house and a person of negative energy and free them to be who they really are.  Before she finds a job, she accidently binds herself to the Crocodile, a mysterious god who devours girls sacrificed to him.  Her special gift endears her to him, though she refuses his kindness for fear of being eaten.  Eventually, she’s picked up by a formerly rich woman who owns an inn and wants her daughter cleaned of a curse that makes her sullen and keeps her from finding a suitable rich husband.  Eventually, she finds out the truths behind the innkeeper’s daughter’s malaise as well as the identity of the Crocodile and the curse he himself is under.  This forces her to make decisions about herself and her assumptions of the world that she never wanted to reconcile.

Sade’s journey was totally engrossing.  After a rather slow start, I was consumed with Sade’s welfare.  The formerly rich innkeeper uses Sade for her own desire to return to the upper crust of society.  All the while, Sade finds out more and more about the Crocodile.  He really wants her to think outside her box.  Sade wants none of it as experience has shown her that she should remain lowly and anonymous.  This cognitive dissonance takes up most of her inner narrative as he pushes her past her comfort zone.  But in that, we discover the faulty source of her belief system, drawing out our empathy for her.  I could totally relate to the dissonance as I’ve had to fight with my own inner demons to realize the value I had to offer the world.  

The Crocodile is a mysterious character.  Sade (and I) wanted to believe that his intentions were good, but experience shows that people don’t care as much as he seems to.  He clearly wants something from her besides breaking the curse that is on him.  Being an exceedingly handsome young man not much older than her, her attraction to him gets in the way.  And of course, he hides truths from her so that when they are revealed, she feels betrayed and deceived.  After reading the whole book, I had to reflect on her back and forth reactions to his behavior, wondering if she was being too obstinate and fearful for a reasonable person or if this was a believable dissonance that took so much effort to overcome.   I eventually landed on the latter after considering her age and the disappointment and despair she had encountered her whole life up to this point.  

There are a fair amount of instances of abuse, both physical and emotional that she and others like her endure.  At one point, she helps deliver a baby for a young woman whose husband began beating her when she became pregnant.  As awful as this sounds, it is based on the fact that greatest cause of death of pregnant women in the US is from spousal abuse.  Ifueko backs that up in her afterword with a citation for a study done a few years ago.  The author explains that she tried to bring truthful experiences into Sade’s life.  This makes the book gripping and hard to read at the same time.  But getting to the end is such a joyful experience that it’s worth the journey.

I give this book five stars out of five.  While Raybearer and Redemptor were terrific novels, this felt like a bigger achievement.  One might say the wrap up was too tidy, but after everything Sade went through, I was glad for a relatively happy ending.  This book may be a harder read than the first two, but it is much more satisfying.  Like the first two books, I thought this one wasn’t exactly YA, except for the fact that Sade and the Crocodile are still teenagers.  The themes are very serious and the abuse may be a trigger for some readers. But the end of the book makes the journey worth it.