Title: The Summer We Read Gatsby
Author: Danielle Ganek
Publisher: Viking
Genre: Literary Romance
Length: 292 pages
Something about seeing all the Christmas lights go up, and holiday party planning for the winter, led me to this book – despite its summer setting in the Hamptons heat. I suppose the deep autumn of Texas has similar weather patterns to summertime in the country of New York, but I don’t know as I’ve never been there. I just know that it’s anywhere from the upper 80’s to the lower 40’s all this Thanksgiving week, depending on the moment and precipitation.
Christmas in Texas always has a flair of Fitzgerald about it to me anyway. This is the time of year when people pull out garden lights, candles, splashes of extravagant color, sparkly dresses, and dine outside where it’s cool. This is when we cook breakfast together in over crowded houses and drink mimosas until noon, only to start pouring wine in its place by lunch. (Naturally we evolve into beer and football by mid afternoon, but that’s not very Gatsby of us is it. We only have so much ridiculous classy flair before we go full on redneck, after all.)
Still, there’s an appropriate place in my winter heart for this summer read, and I loved every second and every page of this witty little romance that had a Whole Nine Yards touch of mystery. I say romance, but the romance isn’t as much for *the guy* as it is for a house – Fool’s House – and a pair of sisters.
Ganek didn’t pull any punches, she created a perfect piece of over the top fiction with all the glitter and glam of the overly fictitious. All those moments you’ve had in your life when you’re staring at people thinking, what a character, they could be in a book. They are in a book. This book. The storytellers, the actors, the gay guy, the foreigners, the artists, the deceased benefactor, the millionaire, the villains, all the archetypes that don’t quite fit their mold… they’re all here, fluttering about like a party of confetti and lights, ready to entertain.
I loved it. It’s a keeper and I’ll read it again.
