Deborah Lawrenson

Review originally written for my blog www.moosenoose.com

I have a particular love of historical fictions set in rural France. It’s something to do with the beautiful countryside and small villages where life is built on age-old secrets, gossip and rumours. If you have never experienced the French countryside then you should add it to your bucket list. Yes Paris is amazing with the Eiffel Tower, Louvre and boutiques, but it’s also noisy and dirty. It doesn’t hold a candle to the French show more countryside. Anyway, back to the book!

The cover is very beautiful and certainly stands out from others in the book store. The back immediately hints that the story is split between two times lines, the present with Eve and the mysterious Dom, including his ‘missing’ wife Rachel and the distant past involving a previous occupant of the house, Benedict. The ideal of a good old-fashioned haunting and the fact that the story is set in rural France made this a must have for me.

I found myself drawn to Benedict the most. She was a very deep character who lived a hard life and carried guilt for things she was not always able to control. But even through all her hardships she remained strong and carried love and hope in her heart when she could easily have turned bitter and nasty. She described her homeland and childhood in such wonderful ways that you could almost feel the winter wind, hear the crunch of autumn leaves, taste the first spring berries and smell the summer lavender. Dom on the other hand was a very mysterious character. He was secretive, brooding and had quite a temper. Early on you knew that all was not as it seemed with him, but there was never enough evidence to decide whether he was the traditional bad guy or whether he was just hiding some past heartache. As for Eve, well she was very naïve and at times, easily led. She dropped her career, family and friends to run off to France with a man she barely knew. At first things seemed to be perfect, Dom buys a beautiful crumbling old house in Provence where there are hidden rooms and secret passageways. They enjoy the summer exploring the house and surrounding region and getting to know the locals. Then autumn comes and Dom grows ever more distant, then bodies are found on the property and Eve realises that she doesn’t know as much about Dom or the house as she should. This is when she starts digging into the past to discover the truth about Dom’s wife Rebecca and to try to discover what is causing the apparent haunting that only she seems to notice.

I did really enjoy this story, I had this constant need to determine not only what happened to Rebecca, but mostly to discover what had happened to Benedict during her lifetime. I have to admit that I found Eve rather weak at times. Whenever she asked Dom about Rebecca he would clam up or disappear in a strop. That would have been enough to make me leave, after all if you love someone, you should able be to share your past with them, good or bad. But then that would have made for a very short story and not everyone is as demanding and upfront as me! It’s the differences between people that make us unique, and therefore make the stories we read more interesting. Anyway, who wants to read about characters that resemble themselves all the time? It’s a bit narcissistic! Therefore I got over my annoyance with Eve, accepted she was a bit of a wimp and loved the way the story developed. I won’t give the ending away, but let’s just say I loved the last chapter/epilogue and was glad that a part of the past had stayed with the house. Do me a favour, go out and buy this book, set aside a day for reading with no interruptions and enjoy!

Favourite line: “I would say there are days when all history stands still and all the spirits gather.” show less

This review first appeared on my blog: http://www.knittingandsundries.com/2012/03/lantern-by-deborah-lawrenson-book.htm...

First paragraph: Some scents sparkle and then quickly disappear, like the effervescence of citrus zest or a bright note of mint. Some are strange siren songs of rare origin that call from violets hidden in woodland, or irises after spring rain. Some scents release a rush of half-forgotten memories. And then there are the scents that seem to express truths about people and show more places that you have never forgotten: the scents that make time stand still.

I had to include this paragraph to give you a taste of the lush and evocative writing contained within these pages. Shifting POV's give the reader glimpses into Les Genevriers' past and present, with both stories being almost equally entrancing.

As in Rebecca, the modern-day narrator remains unnamed, although her partner Dom calls her "Eve". A whirlwind romance later, they are ensconced in Les Genevriers, an estate located in the south of France. Eve finds herself at first enjoying their isolation, but then beginning to have questions about Dom's ex-wife Rachel. Her questioning is urged along by Sabine, a woman they meet at a party. Sabine insists that she remembers Dom from a previous visit with his wife, but Dom conversely insists he has never met her before.

Local girls are going missing, Eve is wondering about Dom and his secrets, and what appears to be a ghost fleetingly appears on the garden path of the estate.

Benedicte and her family grew up in Les Genevriers when it was a productive farm, with tenants and regular output. When we meet her, she is a haunted woman - haunted by memories and by the ghost of her cruel brother Pierre. We learn of her sister Marthe, who became blind as a child, but grew up to become a famous perfume creator, and of the slow decline of the estate.

While not a retelling of DuMaurier's classic, the same feeling of unnamed dread and questioning runs through the narrative, although THIS story actually does slowly tie many of the mysteries together in a wonderfully satisfactory way.

QUOTES (from an ARC; may be different in final copy):

Until it happens to you, you don't know how it will feel to stay with a man who has done a terrible thing.

Surely, though, it was only natural to want to know their story. It was precisely because he would not talk about Rachel that I found myself wondering more and more about her.

It was all such a long time ago, yet in so many ways the circle is closing. I feel closer to the past now than I did twenty years ago. Bats have recolonized the lower rooms. My clothes are torn and patched and I care as little as I did when I was a girl who ran all day in the hills. The generator has broken down, so I live by candlelight and oil lamps. Life is reverting to the ways I knew as a child.

Writing: 5 out of 5 stars
Plot: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Characters: 4 out of 5 stars
Reading Immersion: 3.5 out 5 stars

BOOK RATING: 4.25 out of 5 stars show less

Rating: 3.875* of five

The Publisher Says: A modern gothic novel of love, secrets, and murder—set against thelush backdrop of Provence

Meeting Dom was the most incredible thing that had ever happened to me. When Eve falls for the secretive, charming Dom in Switzerland, their whirlwind relationship leads them to Les Genévriers, an abandoned house set among the fragrant lavender fields of the South of France. Each enchanting day delivers happy discoveries: hidden chambers, secret vaults, a show more beautiful wrought-iron lantern. Deeply in love and surrounded by music, books, and the heady summer scents of the French countryside, Eve has never felt more alive.

But with autumn’s arrival the days begin to cool, and so, too, does Dom. Though Eve knows he bears the emotional scars of a failed marriage—one he refuses to talk about—his silence arouses suspicion and uncertainty. The more reticent Dom is to explain, the more Eve becomes obsessed with finding answers—and with unraveling the mystery of his absent, beautiful ex-wife, Rachel.

Like its owner, Les Genévriers is also changing. Bright, warm rooms have turned cold and uninviting; shadows now fall unexpectedly; and Eve senses a presence moving through the garden. Is it a ghost from the past or a manifestation of her current troubles with Dom? Can she trust Dom, or could her life be in danger?

Eve does not know that Les Genévriers has been haunted before. Bénédicte Lincel, the house’s former owner, thrived as a young girl within the rich elements of the landscape: the violets hidden in the woodland, the warm wind through the almond trees. She knew the bitter taste of heartbreak and tragedy—long-buried family secrets and evil deeds that, once unearthed, will hold shocking and unexpected consequences for Eve.

My Review: Nameless Narratrix tells us the tale of woe of loving a man who did Something Awful. She tells us this while living in his Provencal hameau, which is haunted by some dead French people as well as a few living ones. The hameau is crumbling, with plaster and masonry all falling at random times and in random places. The house gives the new couple a gift or two, including an old iron lantern that figures into the sad life story of the last French proprietrix of the hameau. (Have you gone and looked up hameau yet, so I can stop typing the itals?)

There's an absent, though not known to be dead, wife; there's a tale of Love Gone Wrong; there's a lot of carryins-on about people disappearin' right left and through the middle for at least 40 years; there's misunderstanding piled onto miscommunication via idiotic refusals to ask or answer simple, direct, interrogative English-language sentences.

It's Rebecca meets The Horseman on the Roof set in modern times. I found it unspooky in the extreme. I also found it lushly beautifully crafted, line by line. It's gloriously good at evoking Provence, its people, and its tourist-based economy that replaced actual work producing actual, tangible objects. And it should be read with a glass of young and hearty red wine, a plate of orange-butter-herbes-de-Provence Christmas cookies, and a lover of one's preferred configuration at the ready to sate the appetites the book will awake.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less

The words are like flowers, as is perhaps appropriate in a story where
fragrance and its composition is nearly a character in and of itself. But
there are moments of casual cruelty hidden within the flowery language. There
is darkness, mystery and and the whispering of the ghosts of lifetimes lived and left.

He called her Eve. They met in the depths of a labyrinth and that too, was appropriate,
given that that their life together was wound between secrets she dared not explore. She
was happy show more enough, more than happy, in fact. At least in the beginning. Before the darkness
that secrets exude began to swirl around them. She was happy before the doubts began to creep in,
before the bones were uncovered in the garden.

This story is a journey that begins in the distant past, and ends with a promise for the future. IT
is a journey that I recommend that you take, if you like mystery touched with romance and dusted with
petals of flowers long since gone. show less