Book Review

Book Review

This book review written by Liesl Schillinger about The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek.  She begins by telling the story of how Baz Luhrmann, an Australian filmmaker, bought the rights to The Great Gatsby.  Schillinger specifically mentions Luhrmann saying,  “I own the rights to ‘Gatsby'. I own the rights to it and a whole lot of other books.”  She is upset by the level of unimportance that Luhrmann is placing on this "greatest of the Great American Novels".  She is starting off the review by stating the importance of Gatsby, and therefore setting the bar pretty high for Ganek's novel which has 'Gatsby' in the name.


As soon as Schillinger has praised Gatsby as being one of the greatest American novels of all time, she goes on to say that it "has about as much in common with “Gatsby” as Diet Coke has with Perrier-Jouët."  This does not bode well for Summer.  Although we've now established that Summer is not going to join the list of great American novels, Schillinger does give it its fair amount of praise.  She praises its light-hearted parallels to Gatsby, although still not comparing its literary value to that of the original Gatsby.


However, this is basically where all the analysis of the book ends.  Schillinger goes on to summarize the book extensively, which is a strange tactic for a book review.  Without any sort of argumentative/claim approach to the review, the reader is left feeling unsatisfied.  Am I being recommended the book or not?  I fully understand the parallels in Summer to Gatsby, but I don't know if it's worth my time to read it.  Gatsby is a story that many 


Overall, I believe that Schillinger's article fails as a book review because there is barely any opinionated writing.  However, the fact that she is a regular employed writing critic of the New York Times makes me question my judgement.  Having such a prestigious job title, I wonder if maybe I'm just reading it wrong...?  Perhaps this 'book review' was meant to be more of a sneak peak rather than a critical analysis.