In the century since its début, in April, 1925, “Gatsby” has been adapted for film at least five times; mounted on the stage, with and without musical numbers; and even turned into a video game, in the style of Super Mario Bros. As early as the nineteen-fifties, Scribner’s was selling more than thirty thousand copies each year, and by the end of the sixties that figure was closer to half a million. By some estimates, the total worldwide sales of the novel are now upward of thirty million copies. How did “Gatsby” grow so great, and why has it endured so long?
The answer is high-school English. More than any literary prize or celebrity book club, the school syllabus shapes American reading. This year alone, roughly seventeen million students will take their seats in a high-school-English classroom, and a great many of them will be sitting down to a copy of “The Great Gatsby.” For decades, Fitzgerald’s novel has been among the most frequently assigned texts in American secondary schools, and reading it—or, at least, pretending to have read it—has become a national rite of passage. But “Gatsby” ’s place in the high-school canon was hardly inevitable, its path to the classroom winding at best.
“Fireweed” by Lauren Haddad follows lonely housewife Jenny, whose husband works long stints away at a farm. In Prince George, Canada, she lives alongside a widowed Indigenous mother who the neighborhood looks down upon. An educated white woman goes missing along the highway, drawing national attention, but when Jenny’s neighbor, Rachelle, disappears next, no one cares.
What follows is a desperate search for self-absolution as Jenny first tries to ignore the situation, then obsesses about it. Haddad’s debut novel shows off her mastery of prose and physical description, infusing each page with believable realism.
Flynn is a writer who understands the power of the offbeat. His vision is neither nihilistic nor sentimental; it is, in the best sense, playful. And like the best speculative fiction, it uses its imagined world not to escape the real one, but to refract it. This is a story about children, yes– but more tellingly, it is a story about adults: their cruelties, their hopeful delusions, their bureaucratic failures.
“Awakened” is a story of enormous heart, and it’s not only for those burned by former literary heroes; it’s also for those who need a reminder of what it’s like to see childlike wonder as an adult navigating a sometimes cruel world. For those who love massively multiplayer role-playing games but are turned off by the rampant misogyny that tends to overtake those spaces. Or, honestly, for people who just want a fresh, modern take on a magical quest. Osworth’s writing is captivating and luscious, full of Easter eggs and savory balance of sensory descriptions, exciting adventure, lifelike dialogue and gratifying revelations.
Against the backdrop of our all-but-mandatory participation in a tech culture that values us mostly for our insatiable discontent, it seems almost radical to celebrate any desire’s true fulfillment. Who are we, says Sky Daddy, to deny the Lindas of the world theirs?•
Say Everything rises above the usual Gen X biographies and presents us with a self-aware and contemplative view of a turbulent life and the times in which it has been lived.