Mith's Bookshelf

I've been sitting here for the past half hour wondering if there's something wrong with me because, clearly, the multitude of reviewers of this book must have seen something that I obviously missed.

Ok. Let me just get this out quickly out of the way : Rebecca didn't blow me away.

Maybe I've become jaded from reading too many whodunits or maybe I should have read this book when I was much younger and more naive so that I could have appreciated it better, either way I confess myself a wee bit disappointed.

But that is not to say I wasn't impressed! While the plot may have been hackneyed with the twist obvious from a mile away (to me, at least!), the writing was, to put it simply, superb. Daphne du Maurier possessed a rare skill to evoke vivid images from just her words. Never, not once, in the entire book was I ever bored - even when, at one point, she was describing a lunch scene where the characters just sit at a table, eat and talk about the weather (the scene is 3 pages long in the book!).

The characters were deliciously twisted, with the main character being a naive, spineless, sorry figure that made me despise her half the time and emphathise with her the rest. Mrs. Danvers was a delight to hate - the creepy scene where she shows the second Mrs. de Winter around Rebecca's room brought me out in goosebumps! Ah, and Rebecca! She, whose presence lurks like a menacing shadow throughout the book, sadly, turned out to be bit of a damp squib in the end. Maybe I might have been more repulsed if her nature had been shown instead of being merely described by the other characters. Just, maybe.

Do read, if just to see an example of some terrific writing. They don't make authors like these anymore.