Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Dreaming of Manderly…

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

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“I wanted to go back again, to recapture the moment that had gone, and then it came to me that if we did it would not be the same, even the sun would be changed in the sky, casting another shadow…” The narrator crosses paths with Maxim DeWinter while in Monte Carlo serving as a companion to the abhorrent Mrs. Van Hopper.  When Mrs. Van Hopper falls ill, our young female finds herself spending more and more time with the mysterious Maxim.  At first all […]

The perfect amount of creepy.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

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This was a book club pick in an attempt by our group to occasionally dip our toes into the classics. It had been in my TBR pile for a while, but I just hadn’t got to it yet, so being ‘forced’ into it was ok by me! Our heroine is an orphan girl working as a lady’s companion and we meet her as they are travelling abroad. During this trip, she meets the recently widowed Maxim de Winter. Despite his grief and melancholy, she makes […]

A Familiar Scent Rose Up Into the Air, and I Remembered Something Special From a Long Time Ago

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Rebecca is atmospheric, spooky, and sometimes downright scary. In it, our unnamed narrator meets the handsome widower Maxim de Winter while in Monte Carlo. They build a sort of friendship which eventually leads to a marriage (there’s no romance involved, as far as I can see), and he takes her back to his estate, Manderley. There she learns more about his first wife Rebecca, who was drowned in a sailing accident, and struggles to find her place as the head of the household. Her problems […]

“For a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me.”

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I had the same English teacher from 8th grade on through the rest of high school, save for one semester, and she was the best teacher I had. In our senior year, she assigned “leisure” reading, letting us choose from a pool of books to read on our own every few months, without class discussion, with only a very basic quiz to show we’d actually done the reading. She wanted us to develop a love of reading for reading’s sake, wanted to expose us to […]

When your husband tells you he killed someone, you might want to be a little nervous

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Rebecca is one of those books I was always assumed I had read. I knew the basics of the plot, and of course the famous opening line, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” When I realized I’d somehow missed reading it, I picked it up. It’s the perfect book to curl up with on a rainy Sunday with a cup of tea. While I didn’t love it as much as everyone else seems to, I certainly enjoyed it. While working as the […]

Women Can Be Scary Part 3: Daphne du Maurier

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Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, is a classic that has been characterized as a romance and some sort of gothic chick lit. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rebecca is a dark and suspenseful novel, reminiscent of Jane Eyre, with an ending that involves violence and is far from happy. Like Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the reader might find him/herself rooting for a murderer and feeling distinctly uncomfortable about that. Rebecca is set in the 1930s mostly at a seaside […]



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