My Review:
The Great Gatsby is one of the classics that I somehow missed in high school, and though it is well-loved it was one that I never felt compelled to read. Maybe I just wasn’t that interested in the roaring twenties, but there was nothing about the various descriptions that I had read that pulled me in. I even skipped the film adaptations, I just can’t explain why I had no interest in this story.
Despite that, when I was offered the opportunity to read a graphic novel adaptation, and my husband expressed to me how much he enjoyed the novel, I decided to give it a try. Heavens how wrong I was to skip over this story for so long! I ended up flying through the graphic novel, I ate up the story and immediately ordered a copy of the novel as soon as I finished.
Since this is an adaptation of a piece of classical literature, I will not comment on the story itself since I have yet to read the novel. However, I do want to cover how well this graphic novel does at adapting the story.
The art is excellent, it reminds me of older drawing styles that are fitting for the time period. The pages are beautifully watercolored and are bursting with fun details and color, Gatsby’s parties look whimsical and wild. Where the adaptation suffers is in the format itself, where much of the story is shown to us in pictures instead of told through narrative. There is some dialogue to carry the story, and random blocks of narration, while artfully placed in the background, make the story feel like there are some holes. It makes the reading experience feel a bit like an abbreviated version of the story, showing the major events like a storyboard without any of the detail in between.
Despite this, I feel that a graphic novel adaptation is great because it introduces a wide audience to classic literature in a way that is easy to digest. It helped an uninterested reader like me to take an interest in reading the original work and that I feel is the major goal of any adaptation. In all, I’m thankful to this graphic novel for expanding my horizons, and it is one that I would gladly recommend.
“She was appalled by West Egg—appalled by the two obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a shortcut from nothing to nothing.”
Trigger Warning: Mild Violence, Infidelity
While on the subject of alienation, despite the rather diverse sets of authors and essays, I feel like there were some missing pieces still. It’s obvious from the title what many of the authors thought about the 2016 election and who they voted for. The politics were so black and white that there was no room in-between, and the discussion of what were recent events at the time seriously dates this book. With these sorts of books, the only readers they invite are ones looking for confirmation bias. With today’s political climate in the United States, this is a tragedy because it completely closes the door on discussion with the other side.