F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (Easy Classics) - American Literature Abridged for Ages 7-11 (The American Classics Children's Collection) Paperback – Abridged, 7 Oct. 2021

Bought for my grandson, he and I also enjoyed this little read but, after being written carefully and adapted for children to understand.the ending, although true to history, was written quite harshly.

I love The Great Gatsby. Whilst it wasn't a classic for my generation, it became something of a nostalgic classic for me having been (at the time) forced to read it for a class at school. But, despite the initial reluctance, I swiftly fell in love with mystery and glamour of Jay Gatsby and his spiderweb of lies. This edition has been adapted, quite considerably really in terms of the telling but not in the overall content, to be more accessible for younger readers.Whilst I didn't find Gatsby to be an inaccessible book as a younger reader, I do think it has a plethora of rhetoric and metaphor (green light etc) that can sometimes be a bit tougher to pick apart and truly understand as a younger reader. This adaptation eliminates the metaphor, using illustrations and much more descriptive language and dialogue to make a clearer path of understanding. The characters stay the same, albeit brought to life by the cute illustrations, and the message is even clearer than before.I hope that this book will encourage people to read the original as much as to enjoy it in a different form. For me it seems a really wonderful way in to a reasonably complicated world, I would just hate for the original to be left behind.ARC provided from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.