Great

Great is a retelling of The Great Gatsby as a contemporary YA novel. In this version, Nick Carraway is reimagined as a teenage girl named Naomi Rye, who is spending the summer at her mother’s East Hampton home. Naomi’s status-obsessed mother encourages her to mingle with the popular, elite crowd, including senator’s daughter and aspiring model Delilah Fairweather and her boyfriend Teddy, who never skips an opportunity to wax nostalgic about his career as a child actor. But Naomi is more interested in studying for her SATs and reading Save Me the Waltz than being social until she meets her next door neighbor, Jacinta: fashion blogger, thrower of lavish parties, and card-carrying member of the Delilah Fairweather fan club. Benincasa captures the mood, pacing, and drama of the original and cleverly updates the story with modern technology, social media, and gender swapping. The result is charming and fun, especially in picking out parallels between the two texts. I wish my high school English teacher had assigned this! —Anika (see our Bookshop list of other modern retellings of classics)