Rebecca is atmospheric, spooky, and sometimes downright scary. In it, our unnamed narrator meets the handsome widower Maxim de Winter while in Monte Carlo. They build a sort of friendship which eventually leads to a marriage (there’s no romance involved, as far as I can see), and he takes her back to his estate, Manderley. There she learns more about his first wife Rebecca, who was drowned in a sailing accident, and struggles to find her place as the head of the household. Her problems […]
“For a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me.”
I had the same English teacher from 8th grade on through the rest of high school, save for one semester, and she was the best teacher I had. In our senior year, she assigned “leisure” reading, letting us choose from a pool of books to read on our own every few months, without class discussion, with only a very basic quiz to show we’d actually done the reading. She wanted us to develop a love of reading for reading’s sake, wanted to expose us to […]
Even better than Rebecca
I’ll come clean: I only knew of this book because of the trailer for the film. I’d loved Rebecca, which I read last year, and thought I’d give this one a try as the trailer looked interesting and I wanted to read more of Du Maurier. It wasn’t exactly what I expected–but it was also better than expected. This book was absolutely fascinating and I adored it. I devoured it within a couple days, mesmerized. The story is told very much from the perspective of Philip Ashley, […]
Her face was white and strained, but whether from fear or anger, it was hard to tell.
Rebecca will ruin Daphne du Maurier for you. Because it’s so good and so perfect of a novel that if you read it first, you will be chasing that particular dragon for ages in her writing. So if you can avoid it, read a few of her other books along the way first. Here, read “The Birds” right now, I’ll wait: http://hhs.helenaschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2016/08/the_birds_by_daphne_du_maurier.pdf So My Cousin Rachel is about the to be a movie starring Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin, which is more or less perfectly well cast. […]