I just reread The Great Gatsby since my 10th grade daughter is reading it in her English class. I read it years ago, but remembered very little. It’s impressive what F. Scott packs into under 200 pages. The character development is pretty amazing and the plot rather complicated with the split love triangle. It also offers an interesting glimpse into the party atmosphere of roaring twenties New York, East versus West, old versus new, nouveau riche versus established wealth. I can see why it makes such a good choice for High School English classes. Not overly long, full of symbolism and metaphors. Not so unlike a tv drama with the carnage at the end. I’m glad I reacquainted myself with it. Maybe we’ll go to the new movie version with Leonardo di Caprio and Carey Mulligan when it comes out in December 2012.
This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.
Can you believe I haven't read it? I'll have to get on that!
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