#but oh on goodreads you do get rebecca defenders

[cto10121]

Finished re-reading Rebecca and I have Observations(tm)

It’s so obvious upon rereading that Beatrice doesn’t like Rebecca, lol. She never says anything positive about her other than objective facts, forgets that Gran liked Rebecca, and has uncharacteristic patience with the narrator.

Maxim keeping cool while Favell brags about being Rebecca’s lover but losing it when Favell merely insinuates the narrator finding a sympathetic “arm” with Frank is so revealing.

Also, the fact that it took Maxim so long (literally years) to confront Rebecca about her infidelities—practically only doing it when she took lovers at the boathouse in Manderley—says a lot. Maxim really did not give two shits about her.

Mrs. Danvers practically raising Rebecca (per Favell) and being with her from when Rebecca was at least 12-years-old really changed my perspective on their relationship. Less of a flying monkey to a narcissist and more of a mother/companion figure. The way she worried about Rebecca not returning home and staying up was especially mother-like. On the other hand, we don’t quite know how old Danvers is compared to Rebecca. It could be a case of younger servant / older madam, but Danvers does read as older by a lot.

Otoh, you could make a case that Danvers/Rebecca is a parallel to The Narrator/Maxim, both with servant/master overtones. The narrator does liken her love for Maxim as that of a schoolboy over an upper form and that Maxim is “father and brother and everything” to her. Du Maurier may be depicting (eroticized?) class dynamics.

Rebecca’s infidelity is made into such a big deal (‘30s after all) but Du Maurier definitely wrote abusive signs: Rebecca flogging a dead horse with a whip, her threatening to send Ben to an asylum, her mocking the servants behind their back chief among them. She reads as a female Iago—an excellent liar and manipulator expert at masking and mirroring people. It makes all the Rebecca defenders look really obstuse

The narrator believes that Colonel Julyan knows the truth, but I don’t see how he would. Rebecca committing suicide after a cancer diagnosis would be in character—Mrs. Danvers said that Rebecca had a horror of sickness and would have wanted to be quick about it. He may have had his suspicions aroused when Maxim punched Favell, but honestly, who wouldn’t? Either way, Julyan opted to protect Maxim. It also makes that awful Beauman sequel about his knowing and liking Rebecca all the more stupid.

Surprise, surprise, but I felt for Mrs. Danvers and even Favell at parts, particularly Mrs. Danvers crying and Favell shaken after learning about Rebecca’s diagnosis. But it’s clear they are awful people and so of course they’d like her, lol. It’s telegraphed that Mrs. Danvers would have been 100% okay with the narrator if the narrator had been another Rebecca clone and/or wasn’t such a pushover. Curiously enough Favell was still hopeful to get Maxim even after the cancer revelation…but we never learn how.

On Maxim’s love for/not love for the narrator: The narrator really is unreliable in the sense that everything is colored by her insecurity and her crippling shyness. She takes everything personally—every slight lands like a blow to a youth and all that. How much is Maxim truly being coldly callous—and how much is he genuinely panicked and triggered by the memories of Rebecca’s abuse?

I think a good example of the above is the narrator feeling slighted that Maxim set her up in the renovated east wing suite with the rose garden (usually for bachelor guests) when the original marital suite (the “best” and most beautiful rooms per Danvers) were in the west wing with the sea…only for Maxim to come in and cheerfully say he always loved the east wing suite with the rose garden and it was a shame that it was wasted as a guest room. Homeboy wanted his new bride to be in the rooms he loved and not the ones he was forced to share with Rebecca…aw

And then there is Maxim easily confessing the truth to the narrator and admitting he almost confessed earlier. Weirdly enough, I do believe him—but what a horrible risk! What if she turned against him, feared him, ceased to love him? Denounce him? Maxim knew her so little before they married, and yet he didn’t seem to fear any of these things. Curiously enough, he doesn’t even ask the narrator to help him, either directly or indirectly, and even seemed resigned to his fate. Was he that entitled, to take it all for granted, that stupid…that in love?

Usually I dislike typically the (typically) Christian theme of innocence/naïveté>>>>wordliness/just not being a clueless idiot. I think it works better here though as a basic but non-abusive>>>>beautiful but abusive type type of thematic messaging. Both the narrator and Maxim struggle to move on past their trauma, for want of a better word (the narrator as an orphan under that awful degrading Mrs. Van Hopper and Maxim with all the shit Rebecca put him through). To a certain extent they’ve internalized these survival instincts as mere habit. The narrator’s crippling insecurities follow her as a wife and Maxim doesn’t even think to change Manderley from Rebecca’s influence, renovating only the east wing suite. It took Rebecca returning, so to speak, for them to face their hang-ups squarely. The narrator realized just how much her insecurities have blinded her to the truth and made her unhappy and Maxim gained a true ally.

[inthroughthesunroof]

Trail of Lightning Review

So this is a bomb-ass book that y’all should seriously consider reading. The Rebecca Roanhorse is Navajo, or in her words, Diné. This book is full of her words, and her culture, and her world. I’ve been dying for a good fantasy novel that is anything but European, and this one delivers. It’s set in a very dark post-apocalyptic world in which the Navajo reservation (plus some surrounding land) has become the independent nation of Dinétah, magic is alive again in a big way, and with magic comes monsters. The author does an excellent job of making Dinétah viscerally real. There’s an adopted grandfather character that I would die to defend, and her version of Coyote leaps off the page with Neil Gaiman-like clarity.

It’s the author’s first full length book, and it does show in a number of places. There’s some disconnects between plot events and people’s emotional reactions, and I didn’t follow the logic of the third act. (At one particularly jarring point, our heroes go to a neighboring town to do some research. When they arrive, the town is half burned down, there are corpses everywhere, and not a living soul in sight. Their reaction to being the first on the scene of a major disaster is... to go ‘huh, that’s weird’, go to the library and do their research.)

As one Goodreads review points out, if you took away the awesomesauce setting, the story would be a pretty generic urban-fantasy-with-grimdark-heroine. We even get the obligatory “heroine reluctantly has to dress up, it is confirmed that she is smokin’ hot” scene. But it’s far from the worst I’ve read, and I have high hopes that the author will continue to improve. One of her short stories won a Nebula and a Hugo, for pete’s sake. The lady can write. She may need a little while to adjust to a longer format, but I’ll happily read whatever she writes next.

One big issue I had with the story is that it tries to deal with the idea that victims of evil become tainted by that evil, and I appreciate what (I think) Roanhorse was trying to do, but it didn’t work for me. Details behind a cut more because it’s upsetting than because of spoilers. It’s dark, y’all.

In the opening sequence of the book, Our Heroine goes to rescue a teenage girl from monsters. She arrives too late, and the girl is badly torn up. It’s explicitly rape-like. She explains that part of their cultural beliefs/current magical reality is that victims of evil are infected with evil - not in a literal zombie or vampire way, but in a spiritual way. The girl is now doomed to become evil herself and do evil things. Our Heroine has no choice but to kill her. Our Heroine has been exposed to evil enough in the past to be worried that she’s inevitably becoming a monster too, but naturally she’s special and gets to keep living.

I’m not okay with this. I don’t care what culture it’s part of, the idea that victims are “contaminated” and will always become perps is repulsive and wrong.

Later in the story, another character calls out Our Heroine on this attitude, pointing out that it’s NOT part of their culture, and someone’s been feeding her a pack of lies. You’d expect that after “Wait, why were they lying to me!?”, her second thought would be “Oh GOD I murdered a girl for no reason.” But that never happens. IIRC the girl never gets brought up again.

I’m a fan of heroes who do the wrong thing with the best of intentions and then have to fix it, but it’s a big ask to forgive one who straight-up murders an innocent person for awful reasons. I didn’t find the writing to be up to the task. Like I said, I think this is more due to new author issues than malice, but it still left a very bad taste.

That issue aside, if you’ve been looking for non-European based fantasy, go read this one, it is worth it!