The Fiction Writer - Jillian Cantor - ★★.¼

AUTHOR: Jillian Cantor

GENRE: Contemporary Drama.

PUBLICATION DATE: November 28, 2023

RATING: 2.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: A retelling of ‘Rebecca’ without being an outright retelling of ‘Rebecca’. Offers an interesting ode to the original, but falls flat because of various reasons. Doesn’t live up to the potential.

Plot Preview:

Once-acclaimed author Olivia has been struggling with her third manuscript, ever since her second novel tanked. So when she gets a call from her agent about a ghostwriting job commissioned by a billionaire, Olivia is eager to sign the NDA and grab some much-needed moolah.

The “write-for-hire” task seems quite easy to begin with. Henry Asherwood, a “People’s Sexiest Man Alive” twice-winner and the scion of a wealthy business family, wants Olivia to read his grandmother’s journals, which apparently contain a shocking secret connecting her and Daphne du Maurier. But the more Olivia digs into the past, the more roadblocks she comes across. Soon, she finds herself living her own version of ‘Rebecca.’

The story comes to us *mostly* in Olivia’s first-person point of view.

Bookish Yays:

😍 The first sentence made me grin widely: “Last night, I dreamt I went to Malibu again.” The perfect way to connect the plot to Rebecca while still showing the shallowness of the people in this story! 😆

😍 There are some interlude chapters from the perspective of “the wife.” I found these interesting, as they offered a much-needed backstory for a character while still leaving us guessing about her identity. This “wife” is unnamed, just how the second wife from du Maurier’s book was.

😍 The Daphne du Maurier trivia, quite a few of which took me by surprise. I never knew there were actually cases of plagiarism against du Maurier! The research on the classic author’s life and career is excellent.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

😐 As an ode to ‘Rebecca’, this book intends well. In fact, as one character in the novel says, the connection to ‘Rebecca’ is quite meta. There is the original ‘Rebecca’, which Olivia is a huge fan of. Then there’s Olivia’s second novel ‘Becky’, which is a retelling of the classic from Rebecca’s own point of view. There is Henry’s claim that his grandmother’s journal contains her own experience, which is eerily similar to that of ‘Rebecca’. And finally, there’s the current situation of Olivia at a rich widower's house and having a crush on him when his wife had passed away under suspicious circumstances just a year before – à la ‘Rebecca’! It is a surreal experience to keep track of all the Rebecca-style arcs going on, but a part of me feels it went too far, making the plot generate feelings of déjà vu.

😐 The story stands on its own even while sinking under the burden of so many Rebecca-esque situations, with enough of novelty and twisty turns throughout. However, a few of the twists are so outrageous that I can’t understand whether to marvel at them or roll my eyes.

Bookish Nays:

🙄 Olivia is shallow, selfish, shortsighted, and stupid. Sorry. No way I can soften that blow! I don’t mind unlikeable characters as they add depth to a narrative. But unlikability is one thing; poor sketching is another. Olivia is easily among the worst-crafted main characters of recent years.

🙄 The other characters aren’t much better. Almost all of them have only one role to play, and even that role isn’t well-defined.

🙄 The repetitiveness, not just because of the multitude of ‘Rebecca’ situations, but also because of Olivia’s first person rambling that often goes on and on about the same topics. The middle section is especially boring as it keep running around the same circle.

🙄 The pace is quite slow, even frustrating at times. This, combined with the repetition, made the completion of the book feel like a huge achievement.

🙄 The miscommunication, which begins as interesting, but soon becomes farfetched and annoying.

🙄 Too much drinking. I am gong to mention over-consumption of alcohol as a negative now onwards. I am fed up of characters who subsist on alcohol and enhance their stupidity.

🙄 There is so much talk of attraction and anatomical features! (We hear eighteen times that Henry is People’s Sexiest Man Alive – Sheesh!) I can't stand characters who are so blinded by lust that all their brain power is focused only on the signals sent by their loins.

🙄 I am not a die-hard fan of the original classic, though I did like it quite a lot. This novel will be experienced differently (though not necessarily in a welcoming way) by du Maurier fans who might be looking to replicate the same high. But IMHO, Olivia is no match for Rebecca’s first-person narrator, the unnamed second Mrs. de Winters. The same applies for the duplicate versions of Maxim de Winters and Mrs. Danvers, who just don’t work as well in this book.

🙄 The ending redeemed my experience to a minor extent by not going where I was afraid it would. That said, it was still illogical. The epilogue was too rushed. More like a summation of the next year in the characters’ lives than a genuine epilogue.

All in all, I do appreciate the ambitious attempt of creating a layer-upon-layer version of Rebecca. Though convoluted, the novel does bring the tracks together somewhat neatly by the end. But the dumb and/or insipid characters, the overload of thoughts and actions connected to physical desirability, and the repetitive writing do not turn the potential promise into that memorable a reading experience.

This is my first Jillian Cantor work, and from all accounts, this seems to be her least acclaimed one. I hope my next tryst with her writing works out better.

Just in case you want to attempt this, it is better if you have already read the original classic. Else, you might not get many of the Easter eggs, and also find plenty of spoilers for the Daphne du Maurier book, which is a shame as the classic needs to be read by going in blind. I thanked my lucky stars that I had read ‘Rebecca’ earlier this year. Else, I would have been annoyed at all the spoilers.

My thanks to Harlequin Trade Publishing and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Fiction Writer”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.

PSA: I have no idea why this has been tagged as a ‘thriller’ on Goodreads. The publisher has marked it on NetGalley as ‘General Fiction’, which is a fairly accurate indicator of its genre. If I had expected a thriller,I would have been even more disappointed