I’m going to cry. I started typing this review on Goodreads, and it crashed and obliterated my words. Like it was laughing in my face for trying to say the impossible. Like it was saying “How dare you try to name the unnamable?” But alas, I must try again. 

I don’t think I can describe what this book was for me the moment I started it. A-M McLemore found a way to look into my brain and pick apart all my thoughts on Gatsby and put them to words far more beautifully and eloquently than I ever could. I can never thank them enough for the gift of being known. 

But fuck. Being known hurts. It aches. When I was barely 50 pages into this book, I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to throw up because I couldn’t hold inside me the disbelief at how well this story understood me. I felt myself subtly shaking as I passed the pages. I found myself texting multiple friends trying to put into words why this book felt like it was rearranging my insides, and I was failing spectacularly at finding the language for it. 

The closest I can come is this: 

This book was written for me. It was written for the puerto rican girl going to uni in her island, majoring in English, and wondering why she had to read about some of the most vapid and vile white people she’d ever had the misfortune of encountering. For the puerto rican girl who was obsessed with the language of one of the oppressors of her people. For the girl who understood yet was simultaneously baffled by why Gatsby held such significance in white American culture. For the girl who could only see what was missing in the story and couldn’t fathom why those gaps weren’t the ONLY things people wanted to talk about. 

This may not be a faithful retelling of Gatsby, but it is inextricable from it. While reading it, it felt like a palimpsest. The original couldn’t be extricated from this if you tried, but it is not chained down by it. 

It is free to tackle the subjects I most cared about from a lens that enriched them. Themes of whiteness, wealth, and the American dream explored from the perspective of those marginalized. It brings forward those the glamorized perspective of the “roaring 20s” makes you think weren’t there at all. I couldn’t give a fuck if McLemore doesn’t tackle each and every theme Fitzgerald did in the same way he did. This isn’t Fitzgerald’s book. If you want that, pick up his damn book. I’m uninterested in what white men have to say about other white men and their hopes, dreams, aspirations. 

Anyway ✨

This book gave me the Nick and Gatsby I desperately wanted as I read Fitzgerald’s work. The ache and yearning and frustration had me melting. Every interaction between Nick and Gatsby had me fighting for air. Every wall Nick fought to put up was one I felt I could have myself put up in his shoes. 

It gave me a Daisy that rang true: one that made me as infuriated as the original. One that was surprisingly good at putting up a veneer of the superficial, empty socialite. One who wanted to hide the ugly truths of her actions while still hoping all that made her “other” would not abandon her. 

The book may have given me an ending not as close to the original as I would have preferred, but I will never deny queer authors the right to sink their nails into the ending they desperately want. I know I, too, want it even as I deny it. 

All this to say, this little review doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I felt and thought as I read this book. For someone as obsessed with language as I am, a creative writer at heart, I’ve never been any good at clearly articulating my emotions. It’s always been easier to hide them in metaphor till they’re suffocated or articulate them so crudely you cannot see how much they are my heart in their most vulnerable state. 

At the end of it all, pick this up if you’re anything like me. You’ll find yourself clinging to every word, every page, like tearing yourself from it will tear something from you too.