“Once I made up my mind to leave, a calm came over me. The fight was over. In fact, it felt less like leaving then like Asherley was pushing me out, rejecting me like a body rejecting an unfamiliar organ.”
A modern twist on the classic “Rebecca” tale, our young heroine works for a charter company in the Caribbean and until she pays of the debt she owes her employer for her father’s funeral expenses, that is all she’s ever going to do. Then she meets Max Winter. After a brief summer affair he whisks her away to Asherly, his family’s Hampton estate with the promise of happily ever after. However, Max’s unstable teenage daughter, Dani, complicates things. The girl watches over the estate from her late mother’s turret room and creates obstacles at every turn. She spouts ludicrous stories about her father that her soon to be stepmom is hard-pressed to believe.
“Oh thank God,” I whispered, closing my eyes and placing my phone of my heart, grateful that she decided to just be mean to me, and not cruel.”
However as the wedding turns into an unmitigated disaster, our heroine doesn’t know who to believe anymore and isn’t quite sure what she got herself into.
“…few things angered me more than the assumption that I lacked depth because I was young, or that I couldn’t possibly struggle in a place that was, to him, a paradise. So I snapped back, not caring what it might do to the mood of the evening, or us. I will wreck this before it wrecks me.”
As I wrote in a previous review, I read Rebecca for the first time earlier this year, so when I came across this book based around the same story I thought I would give it a try and see if it suited me more than the original story. And I was not disappointed. I liked that is wasn’t simply a modern retelling but more so a different take on a similar scenario. There characters felt more substantial and well rounded, especially the narrator—she seemed to be able to stand on her own and not just a plot device. Furthermore, this story didn’t feel as creepy but instead more devious. I got the sense that I was missing something, like I had been distracted or tricked. And the ending is so good and so unexpected that weeks later, I am still not sure I am ok. It’s the kind of story you have to recover from. It isn’t often I have a visceral reaction to a story, but this one…
Even if you don’t like Rebecca or have never read Rebecca, if you like an unexpected psychological thriller—give this a read.
This book qualifies for my “flora” bingo square: See above picture.