Oleander: A Great Expectations Reimagining

Beautifully written, this modern MM retelling of Dicken's 'Great Expectations' is more accessible to the contemporary reader than the original, more direct, but still has the power of the classic story. A bildungsroman, it follows young Jude from 15 to 28 as he develops his obsessive love for Caspien, a relationship that calls into question sexual identity, moral obligation to family, friends and society, and his own hopes for his future, for the kind of man he wants to become. This is a story for those of us that had an epic first love, one that made us question everything that we thought we knew, our relationship to society and to ourself, out place in the universe. It encompasses tender burgeoning love, horrible first heartbreak and numbing pain, despair and the realignment that ensues as we find new ways to cope, hopefully new ways to live and be ourselves, the new self, the one that goes on. You do not need to have read the original, you already know the story, it is in our culture, Dickens is part of our collective subconscious. I confess I was reminded of the 90's film with Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke, but only because of the beauty of it's young stars in a contemporary setting (I fell in love with both of them at the time, but that is just me); the story is universal and relatable. My point is you know this story, and it will remind you of what it is to be young and in and out of love, to feel that first pain and isolation, that claustrophobic fear of existential…

Rating: 4.5⭐️ Format: 🎧📖 Spice: 🌶️🌶️.5 This is painful. It’s like who can be the biggest martyr x1000. As an aromantic person, this story took a whole other perspective to really understand. From the moment of act 2, I couldn’t quite understand the overlying feeling of heartbreak and how it overshadowed every aspect of Jude life. The push and pull and the feeling of inevitable pain. Jude wholly knew that pain would come letting Cas in but he just couldn’t help it. Knowing the person that you loved would be the one to break and remold you over must hurt. I wondered through everything, how forgiveness would look like in the end. They got their HEA in the end but this story showed me so many pathways that this could’ve gone and it would’ve still been an HEA. It was excruciating and drawn out to the point you’ll ask yourself, how can one person be the cause of such devastation and solution all at once? I do not envy this kind of love but I can say I can respect the tenaciousness of it. I will say that this is one of the best storytelling that I’ve experienced, the prose captured me from the very beginning and created a very memorable feeling for me. I do believe this is the type of story that will stay with me for awhile, it had me questioning parts of myself I didn’t know existed. Throughout this whole story, the way that I view love as a concept was brought up a lot and I learned a lesson from this. I’ll have to give props to Scarlett, this is a fantastic piece of…