Ice cold and eery, the way the prose makes you feel like the walls are truly closing in and suffocating Mrs Fingal is palpable throughout the novel. The cruelly calculated tactics of Maisie, combined with the lecherousness of Josh was a horrific yin-yang of a dastardly central duo. I felt a genuine sense of injustice for Mrs Fingal, and the plights of Graziella and her pleading for Mrs Fingal's welfare.
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The ending and final twist is something, however, I'd change entirely. Perhaps concluding with the position of Maisie suffering in bed would've delivered more of a punch. For such strength of character, I feel like Maisie is owed a more explosive or revelatory end. There also isn't enough fleshing out of Lena for me personally to subsantiate the shock of her revealing as the real Mrs Evans. Josh's creepy scrapbook of the Italian girls was also a plotline that was picked up and discarded, and could've been utilised stronger.
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My dissatisfaction with the ending does not take the wind out of my sails entirely! A Helping Hand remains a good exploration into elderly abuse, the complex mechanisms of gaslighting, and the horrors that lay behind the frayed edges of embroided middle-class respectability. Just with an ending that is, for lack of a better phrase, a bit of a fart in the bath.