Rebecca in The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge

Jul 19, 2020 Dawn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, death, author-uk, books-by-women, owned

I was first assigned to read this book in my freshman year of high school. I recall being embarrassed by the cover of the book I read--it looked like a romance book, and that was for some reason shameful. It also gave me the impression that the book was a romance, and I think that negatively impacted my opinion of the book initially. So much so that years later when I obsessively added books to Goodreads that I had already read, I only gave it 3 stars. Looking back, the only thing I could really I was first assigned to read this book in my freshman year of high school. I recall being embarrassed by the cover of the book I read--it looked like a romance book, and that was for some reason shameful. It also gave me the impression that the book was a romance, and I think that negatively impacted my opinion of the book initially. So much so that years later when I obsessively added books to Goodreads that I had already read, I only gave it 3 stars. Looking back, the only thing I could really remember about the book was (view spoiler)

Having read the book for a second time as a grown woman, I appreciate it so much more. I don't know whether I was too young to read it the first time or whether it was just that it was one of many books assigned to me and it didn't properly stand out. But this time, I ached for the naïveté of the narrator--her insecurities, her shyness, her uncertainty. If I had watched this rather than listen it, I'm sure I would have been yelling at the narrator to "DO SOMETHING FOR GOD'S SAKE. Do not be cowed and intimidated by those around you!" Instead I went about my chores, bursting with frustration as she sat paralyzed, grateful as the dog Jasper for any bit of kindness and attention cast her away.

Maxim de Winter does not age well as a character--his admonition that the narrator acknowledge that he has taken the place of a father in her life who can tell her what to do was particularly grating. The brown-face the narrator's brother-in-law put on for the fancy dress ball was also quite jarring. For a book that is almost 100 years old, though, I think it was striking that only a couple things were so offensive to me as a modern reader that they took me out of the book and into my own thoughts.

I have a vague recollection of being impatient as a teenager with all the descriptions of the gardens and flowers at Manderley. Surely part of that was my age, but also that I grew up in New Mexico and had never seen or smelled most of the flowers described in the book. Had I read it in the age of the internet, I probably would have stopped to Google images of the flowers, but there was no way I was going to put aside the book to use the encyclopedias or check out a book from the library on gardening in order to learn what the flowers looked like. Reading it this time after a spring of quarantine gardening and many years living in the mid-Atlantic area, I was not just familiar with the flowers, but familiar enough to ponder how they were used to shade the plot and foreshadow future events.

You don't need me to summarize the plot in this review. I only write this to encourage you to revisit the book if you, like me, dismissed it at 14. It reads very different at 42. It was delicious and suspenseful and exactly the kind of book to escape into these days. ...more

Like · see review