But the weight of the pearls was unexpected, overwhelming. “In the mirror, the necklace was shimmering.

Then Daisy unwraps the extravagant pearl necklace Tom has sent her as a wedding present, with a price tag that Jordan lets slip: “So that’s what three hundred and fifty thousand dollars looks like on a necklace.” She fastens the clasp for Daisy. “The dress was a dream,” writes Cantor, “form-fitting lace with a heart-shaped neckline and an excessive amount of pearl buttons - they wound all the way up from my backside to the nape of my neck.” Daisy’s best friend, the golfer Jordan Baker, is there, and buttons the last button. The wealthy Tom Buchanan - or really Tom’s intimidating mother - has paid for Daisy’s wedding gown. But a wedding dress? As Cantor tells it, Miss Daisy Fay of Louisville is pretty but not beautiful, fun-loving but provincial, a striving romantic already marked by private sorrows, and not a virgin (she and Jay Gatsby are lovers before the Great War). Scott Fitzgerald, a distillation of Gatsby’s belief that money by the yachtload can buy him a future with Daisy, and a gesture about which, according to Cantor, Daisy would give not a single solitary fig. They’re something Nick Carraway is fixated on, and Nick has a fixation on Gatsby.” “That scene isn’t there,” says the internationally bestselling author, speaking from the office where she writes at home in Tucson, Arizona, “because Daisy couldn’t care less about a bunch of shirts. Nowhere will you find the famous scene in which Jay Gatsby, having finally lured Daisy Buchanan to the gaudy spread he has rented on Long Island’s Gold Coast across from the Buchanans’ old-money estate, pulls her upstairs to his bedroom and, throwing open his wardrobe, starts yanking out armfuls of the bespoke shirts he has imported from London, until they lie in heaps around her. Search all you want through Beautiful Little Fools, Jillian Cantor’s crackerjack reimagining of The Great Gatsby from the female point of view.

Beautiful little fools jillian cantor