Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

I have meant to read this book for years! And years! And years! But this is just one that has slipped through the cracks for me and I have never gotten around to it, until now. I had started it several times but the first few chapters were so slow that I got put off. But this time I powered through because it was for book club, and I could not put it down. Once you get just a few chapters into it, it's hard to put down. The book is about a nameless narrator who marries a dashing widower and goes to live in his fancy manor home in England called Manderley, and realizes that the whole home and everything is still controlled by Rebecca, his first wife. The book is creepy and somewhat dark (in a 1930s way, not in a gross modern way) and way way way more exciting and engrossing than I thought it would be.

We had such an awesome discussion about it at our book club meeting, which raised all sorts of issues that I didn't consider the first time when I was reading the book. I was so engrossed in the story that I didn't even think about all of the ethical questions like, [SPOILER ALERT] isn't it wrong that he killed his first wife? Isn't it wrong that she's helping him to cover it up? Why do we feel compelled to root for them being able to cover it up? What is so wrong with her that she doesn't care that her husband is a murderer? I honestly didn't even care about those things when reading it--I was just so absorbed in the story and in identifying with the narrator and hoping that she would get the happy ending she wanted so badly with her husband she was so (for no apparent reason) desperately in love with. I think that's a sign of what a good book it was, and what a good writer Du Maurier was. I also kind of loved how she would give you a sense of the narrator's internal thoughts and her insecurities. I felt like her issues were really so general and universal, and written about in such a way that everyone could identify with them. I loved it. And I read almost the whole book on Halloween, which seemed like the perfect day to be reading a kind of spooky, creepy book like this.