I would like to thank the publisher, Netgalley, and the author for the ARC of this book. I read an advanced copy of this book, so the final edition of the book might be slightly different. All thoughts and opinions are my own, as always.

I honestly had really high hopes for this one, because what’s not to love about a queer The Great Gatsby remix? It had all the components of something I should adore: references to a classic that was the beginning of my literature degree, a massive queer cast, and a writing style that kept my eyes glued to the page. However, I was expecting something closer to a retelling, and maybe that’s on me. This is my first of the classic remixes line, and I wasn’t sure what to expect when it came to how close this book would stick to the original.

I think I would’ve enjoyed this book a lot more had it not been carrying the expectations of a Gatsby retelling. It easily could’ve been a book set in the same time period, with different character names and some other small changes to fully deviate it from Gatsby, and I think I would’ve loved this. Instead, it’s deviations from the original book seemed to hurt it, as I found myself constantly comparing the two. While I adored the massive queer cast, I disliked the plot changes made, and this is especially true for the final few chapters of the book. It almost seemed to make the book too simple or easily resolved, and just didn’t match the feelings that Gatsby brought in me.

My biggest frustration, though, was the jarring contrast between what the characters were doing and their actual age. Now, I haven’t closely studied this time period of American history necessarily, so maybe it was perfectly normal for teenagers to be doing all of this. But it was just hard to stay fully inside the story whenever we were reminded of just how young these characters actually were. It didn’t make any sense to me, and just served to take me out of the book at moments.

Overall, I did enjoy this book, but I don’t know if it ended up making an impression on me, or at least not a particularly positive one. It did, however, convince me to read more of this author’s work, which I’ve been meaning to do! I did really enjoy the writing style and how easily I was able to stay in the story. And overall, I did like what this book tried to do, even if it didn’t entirely work for me. I definitely want to try more of these remixes, but now with slightly different expectations going into them.