Book Review: The Lantern
15 Aug 2011 1 Comment
in New Release Reviews Tags: fiction, marriage, murder, paranoia, rebecca
The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson (pub date 8/9/11)
The Lantern is a modern-day retelling of the classic novel Rebecca. It isn’t shy about telling us this, either, since at one point in the story the female protagonist Eve describes how she just happens to be reading Rebecca and is surprised to see how much it resembles her own life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to an homage or a retelling of a classic story. But a note to the author: we get it. We don’t need the not-so-subtle hint that this story is based on Rebecca. That’s like in the Twilight series when Bella spends an entire freaking chapter reading “Romeo and Juliet” and commenting on how she and Edward come from different worlds. Stephanie Meyer may feel the need to beat her readers over the head with literary references, but Deborah Lawrenson is a better writer than that.
Moving on, The Lantern contains all the basic plot elements that Rebecca does: girl meets boy, falls in love, runs away to be with boy, boy can’t get over his missing ex-wife, girl feels overshadowed by ex-wife’s memory and wonders if boy really loves her. Just substitute Les Genevriers for Manderley and Rachel for Rebecca and you have this book. The novel also contains a subplot involving the former owners of the Les Genevriers estate, with each chapter switching back and forth between Eve’s story in the present day and Benedicte’s story decades in the past. While this subplot is interesting to read, it makes it hard to get into the book. The introduction of Benedicte’s story seemed clumsy at first, and it wasn’t until I was several chapters in that I realized what kind of structure the story was trying to take. Also included is an unsatisfying second subplot about missing village girls that need not have been included in the book at all.
Surprisingly enough, I did not think this was a bad book. Despite the structural issues, it actually is well written. Unfortunately it seemed as though it didn’t know what kind of a book it wanted to be. The author likely included the subplot about Benedicte so as not to make this book too similar to Rebecca, but this left me confused as to whether the book was supposed to be mainly about Eve’s relationship with Dom, or about the history of the estate. If it is meant to be more about the estate, the plot descriptions on Amazon and NetGalley are rather misleading. All in all, The Lantern is a decent story with nice imagery, just not thoroughly satisfying.
Mar 27, 2012 @ 04:14:32
I cannot agree more.