Liked it enough to make me read Rebecca. ( )

Well at first this was very interesting, and then it got sort of tedious. I liked the Colonel Julyan parts – he’s a crusty old guy and was actually part of the whole mystery. He was deeply smitten by Rebecca, but I don’t think he ever really knew her. He just had illusions of her like everyone else.

I remember feeling extreme dislike for Rebecca after I first read the book. What an awful, scheming liar I thought she was. This book doesn’t alter that. If anything, I dislike her more for reading her diary. She was childish and spiteful and had a grasping quality that came out in full force in her writing. Nice to know that the 2nd Mrs. De Winter was right about her.

The diary itself is written to an unborn child she believed herself to be carrying. The thing leaves off on the day she goes to the doctor and finds out that she isn’t pregnant, but mortally ill. The beginning of the next diary is completely blank except for one torn page that bears the date and the word Max. Colonel J’s sister suspects Maxim of doing this, but that makes no sense. If he killed Rebecca and saw the diary, why would he have left just his name? No, I think Rebecca tore it herself and then taunted Max into shooting her.

It was kind of fun catching up with some of the old characters like cousin Favel. He continued in his wastrel type existence. And Mrs. Danvers! I always thought of her as dead. Instead we find her living in Rebecca’s old rooms in London, half starved and completely mad, waiting for Rebecca. The 2nd Mrs. De Winter also makes an appearance but she seems to have gotten worse instead of better. She is gauche and unsure of herself. I find it hard to believe she didn’t grow and mature during her life with Max. I didn’t like to see her that way.

The character Terrence Grey/Tom Galbraith was weird too. He’s searching for his parents. He knows when and where the orphanage took him in and it turns out that he is Rebecca’s half-brother. Rebecca’s mother died of an infection after giving birth to him and because she was unmarried at the time, Mrs. Danvers gave up the baby. It was a bit too coincidental.

The story of Ellie, Colonel Julyan’s daughter was also weird. Why she was thrown into this story, I don’t know. I guess it was to hammer home the idea of women’s independence. She ends up alone – her father dead and Tom turning out to be gay. She goes back to school instead of accepting a man’s proposal of marriage. She was 31 and just finished being a daughter and wasn’t ready to be a wife. I understand her feelings but I don’t think she was integral to the story. The whole discovery of Mrs. Danvers could have been done with Tom. She seemed superfluous and forced into the story.

Dreadful. Re-read DuMaurier's original, and use your own imagination. Beauman drains the shadowy anti-heroine of all mystery and spirit, rewriting her as misunderstood and abused, instead of dangerous and romantic; she also insists on linking every character in the original novel by a random process of dot-to-dot, so that Manderley becomes some incestuous tangled web. The author's 'original characters' are also very weak and cliched, and the reader cares little for them, put off by the first person narrative instead of feeling invited in to their world. Contrived, convoluted melodrama; Rebecca deserves more than this. ( )

From my 50 book challenge as "bookiemonster81":

I'm surprised at the mostly negative reviews here. I've always been rather against modern authors tampering with a beloved book. I guess since Daphne du Maurier's 1938 work of schlock-goth fiction Rebecca isn't exactly one of my beloveds, I was more willing to give this a try.

And what a surprise! It's much better written than the orginal, though without the deliciously gothic sense of foreboding and Jane Eyre-ness that haunted du Maurier's book. I very much enjoye this, primarily for the quite subtle yet striking commentary it makes on the nature of memory. What Beauman does so well is not necessarily to revive long-buried characters but rather to demonstrate how evasions, forgetting, and bias can influence how we remember and retell important events in our lives. None of the narrators--least of all Rebecca herself--is reliable, yet the reader gets the sense that each is truly telling the story as he or she remembers it. ( )

This is fascinating as a revisionist text because one desperately wants to know what really happened to Rebecca. (There are powerful hints in du Maurier's novel to suggest that Maxim simply found her too passionate, rather than a devil.) The third section of the novel is the most engaging and sad as Rebecca tells her own tale, but the shifts and hints never firmly reveal her fate. The fourth section then veers away from Rebecca to deepen the feminist reading and, ultimately, destroy the romance and mystery: a great shame. ( )