#BookReview The Winters by Lisa Gabriele @lisagabrieletv @VikingBooks

The Winters by Lisa Gabriele
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“From the brilliant first line to the shattering conclusion, The Winters will draw you in and leave you breathless. . . . A must read.” —Liv Constantine, author of The Last Mrs. Parrish

Inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a spellbindingly suspenseful novel set in the moneyed world of the Hamptons, about secrets that refuse to remain buried and consequences that can’t be escaped

After a whirlwind romance, a young woman returns to the opulent, secluded Long Island mansion of her new fiancé Max Winter—a wealthy politician and recent widower—and a life of luxury she’s never known. But all is not as it appears at the Asherley estate. The house is steeped in the memory of Max’s beautiful first wife Rebekah, who haunts the young woman’s imagination and feeds her uncertainties, while his very alive teenage daughter Dani makes her life a living hell. She soon realizes there is no clear place for her in this twisted little family: Max and Dani circle each other like cats, a dynamic that both repels and fascinates her, and he harbors political ambitions with which he will allow no woman—alive or dead—to interfere.

As the soon-to-be second Mrs. Winter grows more in love with Max, and more afraid of Dani, she is drawn deeper into the family’s dark secrets—the kind of secrets that could kill her, too. The Winters is a riveting story about what happens when a family’s ghosts resurface and threaten to upend everything.

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First, I want to say that I love REBECCA by Daphne du Maurier. It's a book that I have read several times and I feel like I love it a bit more every time I read it. Second, this book, well we got off on the wrong foot I think. I had a hard time getting into it, found it hard to like the story and the characters. So, I took a break and then I came back to it a couple of month's later and I pick up where I left on, but this time did I choose the audio version. And, now the story felt much more to my liking.

If you have read Rebecca, then the story will have a familiar tone. However, I would say that the author has brilliantly made something new. It's more of a feeling of Rebecca than a retelling and that is a great move. It's an intense story and one thing that Lisa Gabriele has managed to do is to make the main female character, the nameless second Winter (just as with the first book) a bit stronger than the meek character in REBECCA. That has always been my problem when it comes to the story. I just like my female characters a bit gutsier.

So, the verdict. If you haven't read REBECCA or seen any of the movies/mini-series then you will have nothing to compare with, and that can be nice and you will probably be more surprised by the story than if you have read REBECCA. If you have read the book, then I will bet that the wedding scene in this book will make quite apprehensive since you probably know what will happen...