An intriguing and delightful queer romance that does not quite bring Gatsby back to life.
A sequel to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece imagines the life of a gay Jay Gatsby.
“I had scarcely got Gatsby across the threshold…when to our astonishment it became clear that there was something resembling life in him yet,’’ writes narrator Nick Carraway at the beginning of Odasso’s novel. Instead of dying from a gunshot wound, as he did at the end of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, this Gatsby recovers under Nick’s tender care and in his bed. Somewhere between fan fiction and literary thought experiment, Odasso’s book sets up Nick and Gatsby as lovers and ships them off on a steamy honeymoon through Canada, England, and France. The couple settle in Boston, where Nick’s cousin Daisy reappears in their lives. Daisy created tension in the original and has come back to complicate things. This time, the drama revolves around her daughter, Pam. A bright and sassy girl with more love for books than boys, Pam is starting to realize who she really is—and who she could be—with the help of her supportive gay uncles. As in the first book, keeping up appearances is a dilemma for all the characters, but here, Nick and Gatsby’s tender love for each other helps them push through society’s expectations. There is something both silly and charming about the premise. Casual fans of the original will probably have a good laugh before getting drawn into the rather engaging romance Odasso has created (although they may need a Cliff’s Notes refresher before the first chapter). The novel’s prose feels impressively witty and natural—if more inspired by the general time period than Fitzgerald himself. The sex also maintains a careful balance: passionate and surprising without being lurid. But Odasso seems more interested in a queer family navigating the world of The Great Gatsby than directly engaging with or reimagining Fitzgerald’s mythic figures. Ironically, true Fitzgerald devotees may find this Gatsby to be a bit of a fraud.
An intriguing and delightful queer romance that does not quite bring Gatsby back to life.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1953910875
Page Count: 170
Publisher: DartFrog Blue
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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