Exceeded all my expectations of what I thought this book was going to be.

I had assumed that it was simply a contemporary update of The Great Gatsby, but with a romantic bent.

No. Definitely not.

It is so much more than this that I'm still trying to wrap my mind around what I just read. The Gatsby mythology is all there but it is expanded on in a myriad of ways, and also boldly rewritten to firmly place it in the chaos of the American times we are currently living in.

Nick Carraway has been transformed into Nicolina, a highly sexualized woman who is coming to terms with her repressed, work-obsessed upbringing. She is a kind of complex representative of the history of America, born from a marriage of a Mayflower-descendant father and an indigenous mother with a heritage that goes back to pre-Columbus times.

Without giving the story away (and there is a LOT of story in this book), she becomes addicted to Gatsby as a man who is both maniacally wealthy but also a kind of free-spirited outlaw who lives outside the bounds of any social norms and morality. He feels like a synthesis of a billionaire mogul and a Henry Miller-type character. There are also hints of an Epstein persona mixed into it all.

What is most compelling about this book is the way it moves in and out of the original Gatsby story with very clever and subversive storylines. Freshly-invented characters emerge alongside some of the old characters, most notably Tom and Daisy, but their previous personas are refashioned into hyperbolic versions of themselves who are infused with both the identity politics of today and complex sexualities that are highly depraved to say the least.

This is not at all your typical romance genre, though there are some very dramatic romantic high notes. The romantic tone is definitively erotic, and many of the scenes are heavily charged with a BDSM dynamic.

One could really go on and on about all the things that are happening in this novel. Though it is obviously based on the original Gatsby book as the ultimate symbol of the flawed American Dream, there is so much original creativity in this hefty saga that it stands on its own as a masterful work of writing up to the very last page.

Just a great read. Highly recommended, but not what you'd expect.

The Gatsby fabrication has finally been unraveled.

I was originally intrigued by this book, not because I am a rabid lover of The Great Gatsby, but because I've always found that book to be incredibly lacking in substance for it to be deemed one of the "great" American works of fiction. It always felt like a hoax. The name "great" was even in the very title. It must be great, I thought. But, let's be honest. It's been mythologized because it's a short, easily digestible tale of a self-made rich guy who tragically falls in love with the old-money bimbo. Yet, the story really is just dime-store drama. It's hilarious that when it originally came out, critics found the plot thin and the characters unlikable, but over time, thinness and unlikable won the readers over.

This new rendition certainly isn't thin and it tears to shreds the idea that any book can be canonized as some untouchable holy icon. I think it's safe to say that if the Bible comes in thousands of versions, a 1920's Jazz Age novel is open to reinterpretation.

I found Nicolina Gatsby to be very disorienting, but the more I read, the more I liked how disorienting it is. The essential Gatsby myth is still there but everything else is flipped on its head. It's amazing what simply changing the narrator from a man to a woman does to how you perceive Fitzgerald's vision of the world. The writing style also shifts around in a more chameleon-like manner. Fitzgerald's lyrical, cadence-heavy descriptions abound but they are constantly undercut by a sort of feminine realism. Characters are seen for who they are instead of pretty dancing caricatures. And unlike Nick, Nicolina has a very ripe interior life even beyond the rabid sexuality that pervades the book from beginning to end.

It will be curious if this novel suffers the same fate as TGG in readers not knowing how to "categorize" the book. Or maybe that is Jones' intention. She's a very cagey author. She knowingly steals the story of Gatsby and turns it into something remarkably different, but she also mocks the very idea that "any charlatan these days can use the Gatsby name in those sordid worlds".

I think this book will probably piss off quite a few people for rattling the cage of literary certainty. So be it. That's what great books do. There's so much crappy "booktok" romanticism out there, it would do the world some good to be forced to actually take the time to read a work as complex as this.