Title: The Great Disillusionment of Nick and Jay
Author: Ryan Douglass
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pages: 384
Publisher: Harper Collins
Review Copy: ARC by publisher
Availability: Available Now
Summary: Seventeen-year-old Nick Carrington wants nothing more than to leave Greenwood, Oklahoma, behind and make a name for himself in the papers. But when tragedy strikes, dreams turn into a twisted reality. Forced to start anew in Harlem, only a letter of acceptance from the prestigious West Egg Academy is able to pull him back into the world.
But the supposedly integrated private boys’ school is more of a catchy headline than a fact, with the same prejudices Nick left behind back home. And his secret but growing feelings for the founder’s wickedly charismatic son, Jay Gatsby Jr.— who dances past society’s conventions with practiced ease—only add more complications.
When Nick’s cutting pen exposes dangerous truths about West Egg and leads to perilous consequences, he and Jay must decide whether to spend a lifetime outrunning trouble or be the ones to light the match. Can they not only fight back but triumph? Or will the powers that be win yet again?
Review: I have always disliked “The Great Gatsby” and not because I was forced to read it in high school; I hated most of the characters and the ending made me angry. A few years ago, around the time of Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby flick (which I loved BTW), my students challenged me to read and teach the book. I thought that with age I would eventually like the book…nope, my opinion did not change. So when Great Gatsby went into the public domain, I knew there would be a plethora of remakes and remixes published. “The Great Disillusionment of Nick and Jay” is one of the first published and it is an excellent remix that explores this time period from an entirely different lens.
My greatest issue with OG Gatsby is the characters but with Nick and Jay, all of the characters are easy to love, and easy to hate. Because this is a YA novel, some of the main characters have been remixed into teenagers who attend a boarding school in West Egg (the gents) and East Egg (the ladies). Tom Buchanan stayed an adult, but is a parent to one of the characters at the all boys West Egg and is still a rich jerk who only cares about himself; Daisy is transformed into a kick butt teen who is trying to save her family from Buchanan, thus, in my mind, redeeming her character. Jordan is an adult bootlegging mob boss from Harlem who is trying to keep money in the Black community rather than taken up by Buchanan and Gatsby Sr. Next is Jay Gatsby Jr., who is a biracial teenager who lives with his white father in the large, but empty mansion, in West Egg. He’s quite popular, but there is a quietness to him which is what draws him and Nick together. And lastly, there is Nick who is such a sweet cinnamon roll. We meet him a day before the Greenwood Tulsa massacre and follow him as escapes the horror of the day and travels to Harlem to live with Daisy and her family with nothing but the clothes on his back. One would think after experiencing such a traumatic event that Nick would be coarse and jaded, but he’s not. He grieves, and Douglass wrote those parts so honestly and beautifully, that when Nick decides that he must begin to move on, you root for him. He still keeps his good hearted nature as he looks for a job, enrolls in West Egg Academy, and starts to make friends. However, there is a soft edge to him now and as he realizes the truth behind the glitter that is West Egg Academy, he has no problem using his voice to fight back.
Ryan Douglass has written an excellent remix of Gatsby that really captures what the non-glittering side of life was like for many people. Opening with the Greenwood Tulsa Massacre is a bold way to start a novel, but the way Douglass writes the horror of the day, the immense loss of an entire community, Nick’s drive to survive and keep running is done with such care that the story honors the weight of the event and honors those who survived. It would be easy for him to romanticize 1920’s Harlem, but Douglass gives the reader a different picture, and one we can relate to. Buchanan is attempting to gentrify Harlem (much like what is happening in many cities currently) and the people are fighting to save their home. When we think of the speakeasy’s and hidden rooms, we don’t often think of the operations behind these rooms and who was running them. In Douglass’s Harlem there is a tension there as the community fights to keep ownership of their own operations and fight off outside forces trying to pull money from the Black community. And of course, racism and segregation existed in the North, despite the good intensions of others. Douglass highlights this as well through the events at West Egg Academy, showing how systemic racism is just as harmful.
Through all of this, there are twists and turns that I could never anticipate what would happen next. There is a fire, a protest, the boys get thrown in jail, secrets exposed, etc. A lot happens in this novel and I was fully into it. Ryan Douglass “put his foot” (to use a Black American colloquial) into this novel, making it a great first novel of what will sure to be many more Gatsby remixes to come.