New Girl

New Girl

by Paige Harbison

She's the new girl at Manderley and she only wants to fit in.  Unfortunately, from the moment she walks through the doors to her new boarding school for her senior year, she's reminded constantly of HER.

Becca.

She'll never be as pretty.  She'll never be as popular.  And she'll never have Max, no matter how much she tries.

But Becca is gone.  She's been missing since the end of the previous year.  And while no one wants to believe she's dead, most don't really believe she's alive.

So the new girl must live in her shadow or fight for her right to be there.

Final thoughts:  Yet another surprise retelling.  I don't know why I'm not paying attention to the publisher's notes.  It was when the new girl was dressing for the Halloween party when I finally put together the pieces that this was Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca.  Sometimes I feel really dense.  And once again, I'm faced with a truly poor retelling.  This is simply bad.  If, like Rebecca, we'd only seen things from the new girl's point of view, it might have been ok, even suspenseful, but we kept slipping over to Becca's vision and that was just a mess.  It got truly messy by the end of the book when the author seemed reach a point where Becca's POV just wasn't good enough and we got treated to three other people's views for just a few pages.  No one in the book seems to have a reason for liking Becca.  She's extremely manipulative and the two guys who seem to care at various point also seem to know exactly what she's doing.  There's also far too much drinking, drugs, and casual sex.  The final discovery at the end was junky and haphazard.  It also doesn't bode well that even the publisher spells the name of the school differently from the author on the book's description.

Rating: 2/5