REVIEW: New Girl by Paige Harbison

001. New Girl by Paige Harbison
Publication: Harlequin Teen (January 31, 2012), eARC, 320pp / ISBN 0373210426
Genre: YA Fiction (romance, sort of)

Read: January 1, 2012
Source: NetGalley

This book will be released January 31, 2012!

Review

I’d completely forgotten why I wanted to read this book by the time I actually started reading it, but as soon as I read the word “Manderley” I remembered why– because New Girl is a reimagining of Rebecca!

It’s the sort of reimagining that either you love or you hate: everyone’s a teenager, it’s set in a high school, and the ending is almost completely different. The nameless narrator moves from sunny Florida to dreary New England to attend her dream school: Manderley, where everyone is rich and snobby and obsessed with some girl named Becca.

The author

I suppose they have a good reason to be: she disappeared back in May and no-one’s heard from her since. New Girl gets the spot Becca left empty, rooming with Becca’s old roommate Dana Veers and attracting attention from Becca’s two old flames, Max Holloway and his best friend Johnny Parker. Drama, mystery, and heartbreak follow.

Okay! So now that I’ve typed all that out, it does seem a bit silly. However, I actually really enjoyed it. I read the original Rebecca early in 2011, and I LOVED it. New Girl doesn’t have the same sort of gothic atmosphere that Rebecca has, but it’s got its own sort of thrilling and spooky scenes. I love picking out things from the original story that’s been shifted a bit to fit in with the new, and the way some of those things showed up in New Girl was very clever.

Still, it’s basically a completely different story from Rebecca, with only the barest of bones being similar. Where Rebecca focused on the relationship between Maxim and Nameless Narrator (the 2nd Mrs. de Winter), the taint Rebecca left behind, and the way Manderley ties all of that together, New Girl focuses on NG’s settling into Manderley, Becca’s reasons for being the way she is (and why she did things), and the effects that those things have on the characters. It’s sort of similar, but…not really.

NG has some advantages over the 2nd Mrs. de Winter as a character. She’s not afraid to speak out about people treating her like crap because she’s not Becca. She’s not afraid to be strong and stand with herself even if no-one else where. And she’s even a bit fiesty when she wants to be, which is refreshing after reading about NN being all dreary and faint-y and generally a bit of a wet blanket.

Max, on the other hand, suffers in comparison to Maxim. I didn’t particularly like Maxim in Rebecca, but I could understand him a bit and I knew that he had actual emotions and whatnot. Max comes across as very blank to me in New Girl. I think he’s supposed to be mysterious but in a romance aren’t the mysterious heroes supposed to explain themselves eventually to the heroine? Max doesn’t, and I’m left cold and disinterested in his and NG’s romance.

Becca, however, gets lots of explanation of why she’s the way she is. I won’t ruin it for you but I think it’s a good theory, and I like that it (ironically?) humanizes the Rebecca from the original, who I think was described as someone barely human.

The one thing I really hated about this book, however, was the ending. It’s different from the original, and that’d be okay if it didn’t also tack on two pages of unnecessary explanation of things that we should have already picked up from the rest of the book! That made me feel that either the author thought her readers were stupid and wouldn’t understand stuff she’d already told them multiple times before, or that the author doesn’t have confidence in her writing and thought she needed to restate things in as bald a way as possible. Or maybe the publisher forced her to add it in– either way, that explanation plus the weird paranormal thing tacked on right after it made me really angry.

Despite my problems with the ending and with Max’s non-personality, I enjoyed reading New Girl. I don’t think it can be directly compared with Rebecca because they’re each trying to do different things¹. As a reimagining of Rebecca, though, and not a retelling, I think New Girl is a fun book with a great story, mostly interesting characters, and a protagonist who you can root for.

Rating

May not be to everyone’s taste, but I liked it.

Buy

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Other reviews

Beth’s Book-Nook Blog: “As an adult, though, I had some major issues. Having worked in independent schools for over 20 years I found the fact that the main character’s parents “got her in” unbeknownst to her as incredulous. I found the amount of time the students were off partying and unattended, etc., incredulous. I found the fact that this poor girl was moved in mid-year to the same dorm room where the missing girl lived and the missing girl’s personal belongings were still all there and in place incredulous. I was also bothered by the Manderly/Becca/Rebecca association, which was intentional as a “retelling”, but wondered if most teens would recognize the DuMaurier reference or if I was just dating myself. Finally, I felt that I was reading the writing of a young person.”

TheBookBag.co.uk: “[...] I have to say that the start of this one wasn’t particularly promising. We’re asked to believe that the new girl (who remains nameless until nearly the end) had parents who uproot her from school with a year to go because of a wish she’d expressed when she was 13 to attend Manderley. We’re asked to believe that, to avoid hurting their feelings, she pretends she’s happy with this even though she hasn’t thought about Manderley for years and doesn’t want to leave her friend. And we’re also asked to believe that Becca’s room has been left exactly as it was when she disappeared, with her possessions still there – I’m quite happy to accept that her room-mate may have left it as a kind of shrine, but surely the staff would have got involved? We’re dangerously close to Lewis Caroll’s ‘six impossible things before breakfast’ territory here.”

Du Livre: “The writing style was very current and very true to how today’s youth both speaks and thinks. Riddled with pop culture references like Jersey Shore (one I’m ashamed to have recognized), Harbison has no problem tapping into the mind of the average 17 year old who is wrought with issues like boys, schools, and missing pretty girls. I especially loved that Paige Harbison included chapters from the previous year of Manderly so that we could get to know Becca as we witness how others in present day Manderly students are affected by her disappearance. We also see how some scenes are not painted as prettily as others remember them to be.”

Notes

Trying something new with book summaries! Did you notice? Did it work out okay? I want to get better at writing book summaries, so I thought I’d better start actually doing it.

Credit
The author’s photo comes from Goodreads. It’s not mine! Book cover comes from Amazon. It’s not mine, either.

Footnotes