Review copy provided by the publisher.
This is listed as a standalone companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, which is a Great Gatsby reimagining. I would quibble with that: I don’t think it would stand alone very well. It opts not to lean in on the explanations of the magic, which is great for the pacing of the novella IF you’ve read the novel and remember it reasonably well. Which I have. I also think that “standalone” is a pretty weird adjective for this novella, since it seems to me to lean heavily on you knowing The Great Gatsby well to see what it’s even doing.
Which to me is not a problem. The Great Gatsby is a very famous book, readily available, and The Chosen and the Beautiful is in print and also available. And I want novellas to be doing different things, I want there to be a range of types of connectedness that stories can have. But don’t kid yourself. This is very much a “what about long after” sort of story of consequences, this is about “what next” for those two books in combination. This is not a standalone meditation about the consequences of the 1920s as WWII is breaking out, or about the fate of people magically created as doppelgangers for other people that it, in this volume, has talked about the process for extensively. It doesn’t have to be, in order to be an interesting read.