The big downside to Chambermaid is that Rao has no control over her characters. They are almost embarrassingly two-dimensional, with the possible exceptions of Rao - er, Sheila Raj, her fictional counterpart in the novel - and the judge herself. All the other characters fall into one of two broad categories: people Sheila likes because they are kind to her and don't have any disqualifying personality defects (this numbers about two or three characters), and people Sheila dislikes (read: everybody else). Almost every character is a cardboard cutout that is left completely undeveloped. Her coworker Roy, for example, has a mullet, participates in medieval reenactments, and has atrocious breath. Every time he appears, his sole raison d'etre seems to be to let Rao make fun of one of those three things. He serves no other purpose. This goes for just about every other character that Sheila dislikes (which is most of them) - they have two or three characteristics that Sheila despises, and every time the character appears, Rao pounds those characteristics into the ground.
The same goes for the judge. The judge's antics get downright boring about 1/3 of the way through the novel because she always does the same combination of things, but in different settings. The judge frequently (1) gets people's names wrong, (2) says "No" three times - e.g. "No! No! No!" - which Rao refers to as the "no hat trick," (3) uses the words "rilly rilly" (read: "really really") to modify her adjectives, (4) is completely uncaring about the feelings of others, (5) accidentally spits food at people, (6) loses things like her dental bridge or orthotic inserts, (7) repeatedly reminds people that she is a FEDERAL JUDGE, and so on. Rao seems to take a paint-by-numbers approach to Sheila's interactions with the judge. In any given interaction, the judge will, say, spit food, get Sheila's name wrong, remind her that she's a federal judge, and drop a "no hat trick." Rinse, repeat as necessary - or until the reader is bored with the judge's antics, as many will be after the her third appearance or so.
Perhaps the worst part of Chambermaid is that the book only works if we feel sympathy for the long-suffering heroine who is on the receiving end of the judge's vitriol. But Sheila is the most unsympathetic heroine I've come across this side of a Chuck Palahniuk novel. Sheila is whiny, self-absorbed, narcissistic, elitist, and misanthropic. She has two or three close friends, but everyone else is fodder for her to make fun of, despise, or talk smack about. It's hard to feel bad for Sheila when she spends most of her time ripping (to herself - she's too passive-aggressive to say it out loud) on Roy for his bad breath, or on Judge Adams's clerk for being a &*$!%, and so on. By the end of the book, I actually liked the judge more than I liked Sheila. I hope for Rao's sake that Sheila is not an exact clone of her creator.
troon Kyle/Katelyn. She retweets the hot take that being trans would be wonderful if it weren't for those meddling cis people.
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