This was a beautifully illustrated adaptation of a literary classic. It was nice to read a different interpretation of a book I love and adored.

I have a large library, including many classics. But I just recently noticed that "The Great Gatsby" is missing from my list! Therefore I found it a good idea, when this version adapted for a young audience came along.

The author did a good job to turn this 100-year-old novel into a quite short and easy to read story. I just think that the story itself is not the best one for children, the issues discussed here are not of much interest to them.

I would have appreciated an adaptation for teenagers / young adults a lot more. Then the language could have been a bit more sophisticated and the story significantly longer and more interesting.

Excellent version of this classic story adapted for younger readers. It could work for students of English as a foreign language too in my opinion.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me access an advance copy of this book in exchange for my feedback.

This book was well written and I especially liked the ongoing glossary throughout. The original story is one of my all time favourite books and I was looking forward to sharing this version with my own children. However, after an initial read through I decided that actually this was pitched incorrectly. The content does not match the audience that it is aimed towards. I would be keen to read other books in the series.

Another retelling of a classic for the younger audience. The great bats you also has a glossary of terms and info and informs you of the characters, which ,of course is helpful but this is a mature (ish) original story and I’m not sure one that really needs to be told to such a young audience that this version seems to be aimed at.
However, I can’t fault the book for staying true to the original nor the way in which it tells the story.

I really enjoyed this middle grade version of The Great Gatsby, a much loved book of mine and one I’ve read many times over the years. I was intrigued to see how such an “adult” story would be adapted for younger readers and if I’m honest, I wasn’t wholly sure it would work, but it does. I think it imparts the urgency of Gatsby’s feelings for Daisy and his lonely sadness at her rejection of him in favour of the comfortable life she has established for herself with her husband. The “secret girlfriend” Myrtle, as she is described, is not very subtle but it does get the point across. Enjoyable and it would make me pick up some other easy classics. If it’s a gateway to kids picking up the original when they’re slightly older, then I’m all for it. 3.5/5 ⭐️

Hmmm... I've seen books like this in the past where I've thought it worthwhile having a mature, adult story redacted and heavily altered to skip over certain bits to retell it for a young audience, yet other people who know it more haven't. I haven't read the original here, either, or seen the film, but I can tell this story of jazz age excess and hubris is definitely not worthy of an adaptation. This is a volume that has to tell readers what World War One was, and where Oxford is, and yet pepper its characters with "secret girlfriends", and disguise extra-marital sex lives as poorly yet most urgently as it possibly can. Reading this from an adult point of view, the story is rubbish – a facile, daft bit of soap opera that takes the 'man coming home from the war wronged, and not with the love of his life' story and makes the cheesiest, most redundant telling of that it would be possible to read on Armistice Day, as I indeed did. That might be an accurate reflection on the echt text, but I sincerely hope it isn't.

What I cannot do is work out what the heck a junior me would have made of all this – either the exuberance, or the vanity, or the "secret girlfriends". I mean, this reads young – so young you would never have found the frisson that comes later of reading adult books about adults doing adult things. And with this being so far removed from such an adult book, there really is little point in turning to it. A hard fail, I'm afraid.

I've never read The Great Gatsby before though it has always been a classic that I would love to get to, especially as it's one of my best friend's favourite books. It was easy to understand and the illustrations were gorgeous

I was offered this E-ARC on Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

We teach The Great Gatsby to our KS3 pupils, and a final copy of this edition will be an invaluable addition to classrooms - particularly when differentiating for some pupils. I thought that it was a completely brilliant version and I love that classics are being made more and more accessible for all. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to read this - I will be certainly recommending it

I love The Great Gatsby. Whilst it wasn't a classic for my generation, it became something of a nostalgic classic for me having been (at the time) forced to read it for a class at school. But, despite the initial reluctance, I swiftly fell in love with mystery and glamour of Jay Gatsby and his spiderweb of lies. This edition has been adapted, quite considerably really in terms of the telling but not in the overall content, to be more accessible for younger readers.

Whilst I didn't find Gatsby to be an inaccessible book as a younger reader, I do think it has a plethora of rhetoric and metaphor (green light etc) that can sometimes be a bit tougher to pick apart and truly understand as a younger reader. This adaptation eliminates the metaphor, using illustrations and much more descriptive language and dialogue to make a clearer path of understanding. The characters stay the same, albeit brought to life by the cute illustrations, and the message is even clearer than before.

I hope that this book will encourage people to read the original as much as to enjoy it in a different form. For me it seems a really wonderful way in to a reasonably complicated world, I would just hate for the original to be left behind.

ARC provided from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.