Review by Booklist Review
Olivia Fitzgerald made a big splash with her debut novel, but her sophomore effort, a modern retelling of Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca, landed with a thud. When her agent contacts her about a ghostwriting opportunity for megafamous billionaire Henry "Ash" Asherwood, Olivia jumps at the chance to get her life back on track. But after flying out to Ash's beautiful Malibu mansion, Olivia feels the first twinge of misgivings. Ash asserts that DuMaurier stole his grandmother's story and wants Olivia to reveal the truth, but he is cagey about producing his grandmother's journals or any proof of his claims. Questions about his wife's death linger, and Olivia finds herself simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by Ash. Throw in a housekeeper who might harbor some malicious intent towards Olivia and you have all the makings of a suspenseful and creepy update to DuMaurier's classic tale. Give this one to fans of other slow-burn, modern-day, gothic adaptations such as The Winters, by Lisa Gabriele (2018), The House of Brides, by Jane Cockram (2019), and Rachel Hawkins' The Wife Upstairs (2021).
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This muddled suspense outing from Cantor (Half Life) opens strong before becoming mired in its metatextual references to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Struggling novelist Olivia Fitzgerald is hired to ghostwrite a novel for "reclusive mega-billionaire" Henry Asherwood, whose wife died in a tragic (and suspicious) accident a year earlier. Asherwood hires Olivia based on her most recent novel, Becky, a rework of Rebecca, telling her that du Maurier "stole his grandmother's story" and that he wants Olivia to write a novel inspired by a more direct and honest account of the late woman's life. The more she works on the project, the stranger Asherwood begins to act, stoking Olivia's suspicions about the fate of his late wife and, eventually, her own safety. Thus, Olivia "step inside my own personal retelling of Rebecca" while writing about the original book's development. Though Cantor is a strong stylist, her ultra-meta conceit quickly becomes too complicated, stalling narrative momentum with extended passages from Olivia's in-progress novel and sacrificing suspense for cleverness one too many times. This ambitious gothic experiment misses the mark. Agent: Jessica Regel, Helm Literary. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The author of a Daphne du Maurier knockoff is asked to ghostwrite another du Maurier--adjacent story. As Cantor, author of the Gatsby-inspired Beautiful Little Fools (2022), notes in her acknowledgments, "In many ways this novel is extremely meta, but what is more so than a fiction writer who just wrote a retelling, writing a novel about a fiction writer…who just wrote a retelling?" Actually, it's quite a bit more complicated than that. Olivia Fitzgerald, struggling author of an unsuccessful book called Becky based on du Maurier's classic Rebecca ("The death knell was the Kirkus review…calling Becky 'a shoddy, ridiculous knockoff' "), is hired to write yet another version of the gothic romance by a hot, reclusive mega-billionaire who claims du Maurier stole his late grandmother's life story. The chapters that unfold Olivia's trip to California to meet with Henry Asherwood are interspersed with excerpts from what seems to be yet another version of the story, titled The Wife; by whom it was written is unclear. There are also echoes of the Rebecca story arc in Ash's own life. Everywhere you look, it seems, there are dead wives, unfriendly housekeepers, fires, and the sentence "Last night I dreamt I went to Malibu again," which is clever but five repetitions seem like a lot. Our path through this house of mirrors is the burgeoning, quasi-forbidden romance between Ash (twice named People's Sexiest Man Alive) and Olivia ("average-looking, curly-haired Jewish girl from suburban Connecticut"), unfurled in such a perfunctory and silly way that it's possibly supposed to be funny. "Then I tried the scone--simultaneously spicy and sweet and unlike anything I'd tasted before. Unusual but intoxicating. Almost like Ash himself." LOL. The clear point of the exercise is that literary retellings are not thievery--Rebecca itself can be seen as a retelling of Jane Eyre--but at a certain point one wonders if there's any reason to tell this story so many times. An overwrought scaffolding draped with undercooked prose. Maybe if you really love du Maurier... Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
