Tag: reading

ARC review: The Gatsby Gambit by Claire Anderson Wheeler

This ARC landed in my inbox at either the absolute best or absolute worst time: just as I was wrapping up my annual reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby with my juniors for the third year in a row. The thing is, high school English teachers pick things they don’t mind reading multiple times a year, and don’t mind dissecting over and over again. I love Gatsby, and–possibly because of the 2013 movie–it was even last year’s prom theme. (Yes, I chaperoned in my best 1920s costume.)

So a murder mystery set in in the world of one of my favorite novels? Let’s take a look at The Gatsby Gambit by Claire Anderson Wheeler.

America’s most beloved literary characters. 
A page-turning mystery. 
The gilded opulence of the Roaring Twenties.
And a clever young woman of unusual persistence.

Be ready to re-think the world of Gatsby.
 
Freshly twenty-one and sporting a daring new bob, Greta Gatsby–younger sister to the infamous Jay—is finally free of her dull finishing school, and looking forward to an idyllic summer at the Gatsby Mansion, the jewel of West Egg. From its breathtaking views to its eccentric denizens, Greta is eager to inhale it all–even to the predictable disapproval of Mrs Dantry, Jay’s exacting housekeeper. Indeed, nothing could disrupt the blissful time Greta has planned… except finding out that Jay’s cadre of dubious friends—Daisy and Tom Buchanan, along with Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker—will be summering there, too.
 
It’s hard to be noticed when the luminous Daisy Buchanan is in the room, and Jordan keeps rather too close tabs on handsome Nick Carraway for Greta’s liking. But by far the worst is Daisy’s boorish husband, Tom, whose explosive temper seems always balanced on a knife-edge. But soon, bad blood is the least of their problems, as a shocking event sets the Gatsby household reeling. 
 
Death has come to West Egg, and with it, a web of scandal, betrayal, and secrets. Turning sleuth isn’t how Greta meant to spend her summer—but what choice does she have, when everyone else seems intent on living in a world of make-believe?
 
Deftly subverting romantic notions about money, power, and freedom that still stand today, THE GATSBY GAMBIT is a sparkling homage to, and reinvention of, a world American readers have lionized for generations.

So my brief review:

This is a book best suited to people who are not intimately familiar with Fitzgerald’s version. I received my advance copy at the same time I was once again finishing The Great Gatsby with my students, so the details of the original were too fresh for me to sink fully into this new world and Wheeler’s versions of the characters.

The story starts slowly, inserting the new character of Greta Gatsby as she finally comes home from all her years of being sent off to school. She begins to interact with alternate versions of Fitzgerald’s characters as Wheeler navigates what’s the same (not much) and what’s different in her version. There are some Easter egg references to the original, but also a lot of changes, and not all of those changes seem entirely necessary to the plot. My students, however, heartily applaud her choice of victim, although they always wish someone else had done the deed. Wheeler offers up various suspects as Greta takes off on her own to prove herself worthy (and independent) in a male-dominated world, annoying the detectives and her brother alike when she’s convinced that the apparent suicide isn’t all it appears to be.

It’s a slow burn until it breathlessly barrels down the last quarter of the book, and it’s at the end, freed from any premise of the inspiration text, that Wheeler really shines. I struggled with the characterization of Tom, Daisy, Nick, Jordan, and Jay because I wasn’t sure how much I was supposed to remember from Fitzgerald and how much they were supposed to be different (changed, perhaps, because it seems most of the events of Fitzgerald’s book happened the summer before this one starts). If you have faint memories of lavish parties and a green light from your own high school days, you’ll probably enjoy it.

Four stars out of five

The thing is, unless you routinely go through Prestwick House chapter questions about the book, you’re not going to notice a lot of Wheeler’s changes. Who remembers what religion the Buchanans are, anyway? (Everyone who has to answer the question about the elaborate lie that surprises Nick in Chapter II, at least if they have to correct it once a year.) I’m not sure why it ends up as one of the book’s great quotes, but in the original, they’re not Catholic. Wheeler, however, makes a point of stressing the fact that they are.

On the one hand, it seems like such a silly thing, but on the other … why use the Gatsby name at all? There have to be changes to keep Jay alive, of course (spoilers, sorry) and the fact that Wheeler gives him a younger sister to be at the center of the story makes for further changes, but the best parts of the book are the ones where Wheeler’s original characters take center stage and shove the well-known (and possibly hated) Fitzgerald characters to the side. I think that’s even a large part of what makes for a slow start: she has to spend so much time explaining who her Gatsby and Daisy and Tom and Nick and Jordan are, and separating them from the characters we might be expected to know.

Every so often there’s what seems to be an Easter egg–Daisy’s wedding necklace, for example, plays a part–but they’re at odds with the new backstories and new relationships Wheeler’s trying to forge. Why make these callbacks to specific parts of the original (like a gas station owner and his wife moving away for some mysterious reason) when so many other aspects of the characters’ histories and personalities have changed? Jay Gatsby is still a rich man with poor beginnings who throws parties, but those poor beginnings are vastly altered and Wheeler never quite explains how, if he isn’t a bootlegger, he went from poor to a soldier to his vast wealth.

Are these questions going to plague most readers? I doubt it. But I also think Wheeler’s story would have been stronger if she’d either more fully committed to Fitzgerald’s characters or been allowed to leave the Gatsby name behind entirely. As it stands, the title alone sets us up for a much deeper connection between the source text and her murder mystery than we find in the book.

I’m especially interested to see how readers who don’t have such a close connection to The Great Gatsby respond because, like I said, I was either going to be the best or the worst audience for this book.

The Gatsby Gambit is out April 1.

12 Challenge, book two – State of Terror

Late last December, I decided to go ahead and do the “12 Challenge” that was going around Twitter: 12 months to read 12 books recommended by 12 friends. I specifically requested true crime and thrillers, looking for good books I haven’t read yet. Book one was Dark River: The Bloody Reign Of The Ohio River Pirates, and book two is State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny.

So, first: I don’t usually read political thrillers. Expanding reading horizons is part of the challenge, and the friend who recommended it pointed out that maybe it’s a stretch.

That being said, it reminded me a lot of Dan Brown‘s Robert Langdon books. You know. Angels and Demons? The Da Vinci Code? There’s a lot of globetrotting and seeing the sights, calling out different locations and well-known sights. There’s also the sort of “very few people in the world even know what I’m telling you” aspect to it that always made me wonder how, exactly, Dan Brown learned this secret information (and why it’d be safe to just tell the world in a best-seller if the information is indeed secret) but, in State of Terror, makes you remember who one of the authors is.

I spent a lot of time being very aware who one of the authors is.

The main character is, after all, the Secretary of State. She’s just come on board after a very awful president who gets a bunch of jibes thrown his way. Ellen Adams is also blonde and gets called names that quickly go viral – it’s not “nasty woman,” but … you know it totally is. So clearly any state secrets Ellen Adams reveals to readers can’t actually be real, but … I mean, it makes you wonder.

If I hadn’t known Hillary Rodham Clinton was one of the authors, some of those things probably wouldn’t have jumped out at me like they did. It’s all “write what you know” until “what you know” happens to be about a high-ranking informants’ council but I do trust that, when Ellen Adams says something in Washington, DC is a ten minute walk, it’s a ten minute walk.

I did struggle some with the chronology. I’ve talked about narrative timelines before, but this wasn’t an issue of how all travel takes place between chapters, with a single turn of the page. They sleep on flights or hey, nothing interesting happens, and then they go for hours and hours without sleeping. They’re running on adrenaline. That’s fine.

What really threw me – and it’s something that happened for the first time on page one – was how a chapter would open with a line of dialogue, bang, in media res, and then the narration would back up so we knew where we were, who was there, and what was going on … but that dialogue never showed up again to place it in proper context.

If a chapter opened at 8:00 PM sharp, the narration would back up to 7:30, where we’d last left everyone, and then apparently go until 7:59 … but skip ahead to 8:01? Maybe? I’m still not entirely sure, but until I caught on to what was happening, I was just forcing myself along and hoping it would make sense later. (Which happens a lot when I read large cast books for the first time. Stephen King, I’m looking at you.)

There’s also the fact that, as I said, I don’t read political thrillers, so maybe that’s a genre thing. You get the snappy dialogue immediately and then have to sort out all the rest as you go.

There was also a fair amount of head-hopping. It’s totally the bane of a lot of writers’ existence. It’s really easy to do subtly – have your point of view character understand what someone else is thinking, oops – but this was jarring at times. You’re following Ellen and suddenly you’re in someone else’s head, looking at Ellen and reading about her in terms she wouldn’t use for herself.

But those are structural things. Maybe generic things. (As in, specifically genre-related.) Was it a good book?

Wait, how do we define a good book?

I don’t like rating books for this very reason. I just keep a list of which ones I’ve read and that’s that. But if, for whatever reason, I want to keep reading to figure out how it all turns out – even if it’s because I want to know if the author’s actually going to give a good explanation (cough Stephen King again cough) then I consider it a good book. It did what I wanted it to do: took me away from whatever’s going on in the world or my life at the moment and made me care about something else for a bit.

So, by that standards: yes, State of Terror is a good book. I read it in a day. I’m a fast reader, sure, but if I don’t like a book, it’s slower than molasses. I wanted to know what was happening with Ellen, and to see if I figured out the FSO’s secret, and how some of the other characters’ relationships would shake out in the end. Plus I wanted to know the big whodunit, and there were a couple times I doubted my original impression, which is major for me. I read so many thrillers that it’s rare for a twist to truly shake me.

But I still don’t think I’m much of a political thriller fan.

Have you read State of Terror? Or do you read political thrillers and have some answers for me?

12 Challenge, book one – Dark River: The Bloody Reign Of The Ohio River Pirates

Late last December, I decided to go ahead and do the “12 Challenge” that was going around Twitter: 12 months to read 12 books recommended by 12 friends. I specifically requested true crime and thrillers, looking for good books I haven’t read yet. I’ve finished my first selection from that list: Dark River: The Bloody Reign Of The Ohio River Pirates, by Robert Walsh and Wayne Clingman, recommended to me by Robert himself.

It’s a subject I knew nothing about. I read a lot of true crime, sure, from various centuries, but river pirates were new to me. I even looked through the indices of some of the surveys of murder in America that I’ve read to check for some of the names Walsh and Clingman mention, and nothing popped up. So at least I didn’t already read about these people and then forget them.

They cover multiple groups that worked along the Ohio River prior to 1850, and they all seem to be groups. River piracy wasn’t for loners, and it died out with the paddle steamers. Pirates depended on outnumbering their victims and being able to make a quick getaway.

There are different chapters for different groups, and some highlights include:

The Harpes, brothers – or maybe they were cousins – who get presented as “often been called America’s first serial killers.” This is where I first went to my other books, because … who? I’d never heard of them. But apparently river piracy wasn’t just for men who wanted to rob the rich. It was a good profession for men who just wanted to kill people.

James Ford, who was either “Lucky Luciano or Fagin with a Southern accent.” A lot of these pirates have a very mobster feel to them, and I don’t usually read books about the mob. The way to get around the law – aside from crossing the river and moving to land under control of another country entirely – was being the law, or at least paying those who had high positions.

The Potts Hill Gang, who may or may not have been fictional, but who had a very interesting story. Possible spoilers here: a son who had been kicked out of the gang decided to return years later, in disguise, to surprise his family. A “spotter,” sent out to gage the apparent wealth of travelers so the gang would take an unnecessary risk killing a poor man, decided the son looked like a good target. When the “stranger” came along, the father killed him. Which seemed fine, until rumors started that the son was supposed to have come back. In order to keep his wife from wailing that he’d committed filicide, the father dug up his latest victim so she could have a look … and positively identify her son. (Moral of the story: don’t try to trick pirates.)

There’s also some interesting information about forgery, a crime I also don’t usually read about. It’s very much situated in the time and place, between different countries and with changing/emerging laws to contend with, along with Regulators and lawmen and the rest.

It was an interesting read, although I think it’s pretty niche – these stories aren’t usually covered even in lengthy surveys of the history of crime in America. If that’s a crevice you’re interested in exploring, pick up a copy and dive in.