I need to begin this review with a confession. I haven’t fully read The Great Gatsby, just a few chapters many years ago. Yes, I have seen the movie with Leonardo Di Caprio, and one of my children was reading the book for their English class so we had the study guide which I read at the time to help them with their essay, so I do know about the plot and the narrator Nick Carraway, who was my favourite character so I jumped at the chance to learn more about him from author Michael Farris Smith’s imagination.

We first meet Nick when he is just leaving Paris to return to the battlefields during WWI. Just like the real war, the author doesn’t shy away from the horrors and the bloody scenes of war. The wording leaves you in no uncertain terms of how devastatingly bad the war was for both the men fighting and the people caught up in it.

As well as his time fighting the book also focuses on Nick’s love for his French lover, Ella, and via flashbacks, we get to hear about their relationship. We also see his relationship with his family, including his mother’s depression and his father who wanted him to take over the family business, not head off to New York to sell bonds.

The book ends where The Great Gatsby begins with Nick seeing Jay Gatsby on the end of the pier looking out across the water. This was a nice touch to the original book which you can tell is loved by the author.

The book is quite wordy and reads like a classic book. I had to read it quite slowly to take everything in because it was quite tough at times with some of the scenes. It was, however, fascinating to hear how the author believed that Nick’s life was before he lived in the cottage next to Jay Gatsby’s mansion in West Egg. It is heart-breaking, poignant, and takes the reader on a journey of Nick’s self-discovery as well as his harsh past, having to deal with so many things that could drive anyone to breaking point and leave a person scarred for life, both physically and mentally.

This is a book that any loyal The Great Gatsby fans should read. It might not have been written by the original author F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it is a story that I feel compliments the original and may even make you appreciate it a little more with a backstory to Nick Carraway’s life.