Welcome to Encore our binge reading episode, where we chat to previous guests of the show about their latest releases. And today we're talking to Jillian Cantor about Beautiful Little Fools her re-imagining of an American classic from the viewpoint of the female characters.

Hi there. I'm your host, Jenny Wheeler. Jillian last appeared on the show in July, 2021, talking about Half Life the Marie Curie story, the fictionalized story of the famous physicist who won the Nobel Peace Prize twice.

You can find that in our backlist at the link below.

Today's book, Beautiful Little Fools is rather different. It takes F Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age classic, The Great Gatsby and tells of the critical events in that story through the eyes of the three main women characters, Catherine, Daisy and Jordan.

Our free book offer this week is More Historical Mysteries: Top Up on Your Holiday Reading

Historical mystery authors have joined together to offer you a great range of choices for free download.

https://books.bookfunnel.com/historicalfictionfreebienovember2022/eitpht3ua8

DOWNLOAD FREE HISTORICAL MYSTERIES

Links mentioned in this episode:

Jillian Cantor on The Joys of Binge Reading, July 2021: https://thejoysofbingereading.com/jillian-cantor-marie-curie-re-imagined/

The Great Gatsby: F Scott Fitzgerald https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4671.The_Great_Gatsby

Beautiful Little Fools: The Book Club Guide  https://tinyurl.com/eu4caf3e

Cliff’s Notes for The Great Gatsby: https://tinyurl.com/mr3ah9p2

Gatsby Movies:

Paul Rudd version: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0748620/

Leonardo Di Caprio Baz Luhrmann: version: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343092/

Daphne de Maurier: Rebecca https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/23/olivia-laing-on-daphne-du-mauriers-rebecca-80-years-on

Where to find Jillian Cantor online:

Website: www.jilliancantor.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jilliancantor/

Facebook: @authorjilliancantor

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1651861.Jillian_Cantor

But let's allow Jillian to tell us all about it.

Hello there, Jillian, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you back with us.

Jillian Cantor: Hi, how are you?

Introducing author Jillian Cantor

Jenny Wheeler: I'm really good, thank you. Tell us, what's different about your book to the great classic

Jillian Cantor: The original Great Gatsby takes place over one summer in this fictional part of Long Island and it's narrated by an outsider, Nick Carraway, who's distantly related to Daisy and becomes enamored with his neighbor, Jay Gatsby, over the summer.

And my novel is narrated by the women who are in F Scott Fitzgerald's story, but don't really have much of a voice in it.

So the things that Nick tells us about that summer often come up in my novel, but appear very differently from the women's points of view.

And my novel also starts in 1917, about five years before the original Great Gatsby and then goes through the summer that The Great Gatsby takes place in.

Jenny Wheeler: And by doing that, by adding those extra years, we also get a really clear idea of those women, Catherine, Daisy and Jordan, and how they might be interlinked and also how they are all in the net surrounding Gatsby himself. And that's a fun part of the story, to understand or to be given those interconnections.

The women characters get their say

Jillian Cantor: That was my fictionalizing, the story. In the original, the women are involved so much in the plot, the affairs and the murders and the parties and the glamor all revolves around the women, but in the original novel, they don't speak very much. We definitely don't know what they're thinking.

My novel brings that all together and explores what that might have been.

Jenny Wheeler: Run us through the process of how you got drawn into taking this on as your next book. What was the fascination for you in it?