3 hours ago August 13, 2026Meg

Daisy

Katie Cotugno’s upoming novel Daisy is a revisiting of The Great Gatsby, from Daisy’s perspective, opening after the events of that novel. Daisy takes place in the present day, even if the characters do go to a lot of jazz clubs and 20s-themed parties.

Meh.  Some of this is on me, I think. I enjoyed The Great Gatsby and I really liked Katie Cotugno’s Pride and Prejudice reimagining, Meet The Benedettos, so I was excited to read this one, but I realized partway through reading Daisy that Daisy wasn’t really all that compelling to me in Gatsby either. She’s more of a goal than a person, and her main characteristics are beautiful, rich, and married, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find her as a slightly flat main character. A lot of the book is Daisy going to parties or Pilates, and wondering if someone is out to get her and if Tom is cheating again, which all matched a modernized Daisy Buchanan very well.

So this is described as a domestic thriller, which is usually my favorite kind of suspense. I liked that the deaths are both shocking and 100% gore-free, which is also my favorite kind of murder!  But, the overall drama suffered from Only One Guy, which is when you realize that the killer must be someone close to the victim, but then that means there’s really only one possibility.
Without spoilers, I found the ending disappointing. The suspense is leading up to what seems like a confrontation, but we don’t see the confrontation, we skip to a new scene a few weeks later.  The end of the book doesn’t work quite right as suspense, and doesn’t work quite right as a character-driven story, either. The central emotional questions of the book, about whether Daisy can find happiness and love again, and whether she can be independent, mostly happen offstage, leaving the ending underwhelming.

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