All right, I won’t lie. The book started off really slowly, and I admit I wanted to put it down several times. It got to the point, even, where I just wanted to set it aside alltogether, thinking that if it wasn’t going to pick up the pace that I didn’t really want to spend precious novel-planning time reading it. I’m very glad that I continued, though, to read what turned out to be a spectacularly written composition about love, longing, and loss.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier may be one of those books you’ve seen a lot, perhaps you’ve read something about it here and there, seen it mentioned, but you never really thought to pick it up. Perhaps it’s because it was shelved in the Gothic Romance section of your bookstore, right before Georgette Heyer and Barbara Michaels. You thought, well, it’s probably not my thing, so I’m not going to bother with it. Instead I’ll continue through life hearing references to it, and shrugging. At least that’s what I thought.

It starts at the end, or rather a little bit after the end, and then takes you back into time and brings you up to why the end is where it is (it doesn’t start immediately where it ends, but presumably a few years afterwards, as the characters are much older and more experienced). That beginning part, that was the slow part, but once we were taken back into time by the narrator, to meet Maxim, Mrs. Danvers, Frith, and eventually Rebecca, that’s when I couldn’t put the book down.

Shocked? It’s true. Rebecca is not the narrator. She’s the exwife of Maxim, now dead, and the narrator is the new 20 years younger wife of Maxim. Their relationship is strained; she’s merely 21 years old, but she’s madly and devastatingly in love with a man who gives her short responses and doesn’t seem to appear to be in love with her at all. She wonders if he married her just for the company, or to feed from her youth, or, worst of all, to have another dog to pet (yes, she compares herself to the dog a lot). To her, he’s probably still intensly in love with Rebecca, so a beautiful, loving, companionable relationship will never bloom between them.

This book wasn’t predictable. The twist comes suddenly and it’s remarkably shocking. I sat with my mouth gaping open for a good five minutes before I could continue, because I just could not believe it. The only characters in this novel with any sort of decent development are Rebecca and the narrator, though Rebecca is never alive, only talked about, and more or less a ghost.

It’s tricky to call her a “ghost,” you see, because she wasn’t an ethereal being who hung about the house poking fun at Maxim and his new wife. She was alive, however, through other characters. Maxim’s refusal to talk about her even kept her presence, but it was Mrs. Danvers who really let it all go. If you’ve ever read about a creepy, skeleton-like character who was obsessed with her mistress, you’ll have to rethink that interpretation after reading Rebecca. Mrs. Danvers was always a shadow to our narrator, creeping about, getting her into the wrong sorts of things. But when Rebecca was mentioned, suddenly her face lit up, she regained all of her color, and she passionately swept through rooms like a butterfly in the moonlight.

And, of course, the narrator keenly felt the dead woman’s presence. It wasn’t just Mrs. Danvers or Rebecca’s cousin Favill, it was her mind that did it. Can I tell you something? This creature was annoying. I liked her, don’t get me wrong, but she was 21 years old, and it reminded me a lot of myself when I was 19 years old. Something would happen that she couldn’t quite understand, and she’d make up several possibilities as to why it might have happened. One, perhaps, would be positive and logical, but the rest would be completely negative, even bringing people out of their normal selves to explain a situation. She would go on for two to four pages about how her life was over because of this one silly thing that happened, then once you turned the page again, it would be solved, simply and quickly, and everything would be fine. No, really, perfect! How could she have been so odd about it? Let’s move on with life, but don’t forget to mention that you’ve “grown” because of this experience, and you’re not the same person you were two pages ago.

…Except, then you do the exact same thing five pages later. Perhaps if she had really grown at some point and stopped living in her fantasies and realized that her ideas were much too elaborate to be real, it would have been fine. But, as I said, it reminded me of me when I was 19, much too young to understand the world but old enough to think I did. Sometimes it’s positively exciting when I find myself in a book, but in this instance, I was just reminded of all the stupid things I did back then. I wanted to tug her arm and tell her to stop it at once, that she wasn’t helping anything, and that everything would be fine.

In any case, these fantasies led to her opinions on Rebecca, and her ideas about Maxim’s love for Rebecca, and it generally made her a poor sport throughout the book. She kept the dead exwife alive, however, in a way that perhaps Mrs. Danvers couldn’t accomplish. While Mrs. Danvers dusted her old rooms and saved all of her things to touch, smell, and remember, the narrator was acutely frightened of her. A ghost.

Now I’ve come to the end of my review and you’re probably wondering one of two things (or both!). In all my long-winded criticism, what did I like about the book? And why have I never mentioned the narrator’s name?

To the first, I’ll tell you that the only thing that annoyed me was the narrator’s conception of life. It, however, fueled the book, and explained a lot of why she didn’t understand things that were blatantly in front of her face. (It was easy to guess about the white dress, for example, but that other thing I mentioned was still such a shock.) For a while I thought the book poorly developed because there were several characters, but only two took the spotlight. Maxim, despite being there from beginning to end, was barely comprehended at all, except as the love of the narrator. But then I realized that this actually isn’t a romance novel. It’s not about the love between two people, it’s about Rebecca’s effect on everyone she’d touched in her life. It’s about how a woman became a ghost to a whole slew of people, some she haunted, others she lingered near because they loved her. And it’s about the things that happened during her life which caused that to happen. It’s more of a mystery, really. And when was the last time I wrote something this long about a book? I love books that make me think.

As to the second, the narrator didn’t have a name in the book. It was mentioned once or twice—”You have a lovely name,” and, “It suits you well,” and so on—but aside from slight references, we are never told what her name is. The significance I think is tied up into Rebecca, of course, whose name is all over the book. A question is brought up sometime towards the end of the book, about whether or not Rebecca “won.” It’s generally concluded by the characters that she didn’t. Yet, she’ll be the one I walk away from this book remembering.

Someone will ask me some day what this book is about and whether or not I recommend it. I’ll have to say, “You know, I really don’t know, without giving it all away, and yes, I really do recommend it.”