The book wasn’t what I was expecting. I had a hard time connecting with the characters and story. It’s a dnf for me. I will not be posting my review on any of my public sites. Thank you NetGalley for the ebook. My rating is a 2.5.

I originally received a copy of this book through Net Galley.
"Many Are Invited" follows Steve Galanos as he remembers his time in the 90's, working in Silicon Valley. As a man working in tech, Y2K could bring a lot of problems, especially for him, but with all of the impending chaos around him, what impacts him the most is a housewarming party he attends in 1999.
This book fell flat for me. I was really excited by the prospect of a "thriller" set in the 90's, especially one that addresses the fear people had about what would happen to the computers when the year 2000 hit, but this did not read like a thriller to me. Sure, there is some "mystery" as Steve tries to learn more about the other characters in his life, but this book reads like a contemporary, with some historical elements. There are several elements of this book that are similar to "The Great Gatsby", even flat-out reference to "The Great Gatsby", and I feel like if the author wanted to write something similar to that classic, perhaps there should not have been any attempt made to be a "thriller". It felt like two genres that do not go together competing against each other, and neither won.
Steve is a very vanilla character. He is the typical male, who is sexist, dull, and works a boring office job. There is nothing particularly interesting about him, which arguably, could make him relatable for a lot of people. His narrative and inner voice just read flat to me.
For such a short book, this book took me a long time to get into, and it felt so much longer than it actually was.
The whole point of this story is that something traumatic happens at the housewarming party, but the party does not even start until 60% into the book. Then while at the party, it seems to drag until the "big reveal". There is hardly any time after we learn what happened and the end of the book, which made the resolution, if you can call it that, feel rushed and entirely unresolved.
I am not super interested to read more from Dennis Cuesta at this time.

Many Are Invited by Dennis Cuesta is a book about the main character who is basically jealous of their friend who only happens to be luckier than he is. He spends his time criticizing others, their relationships, and how they live their lives. Also, to be honest, the friend wasn't the best either. In short, the main character blames others for what goes wrong in his life and failures that don't pan out in his favor instead of taking accountability for his actions. I wasn't fond of this book and won't be returning to it any time soon.

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Yikes. I have put this one off for a long time. The characters were awful. The story drags, but it's not a very long book. You may like it.

A Y2K retelling of Gatsby. A visit to the 90s with start ups, the tech boom, and the looming 2000s with career jealousy and romantic jealousy to make it read a bit like a soap opera. It was an easy read, nothing too exciting and not life changing. There wasn't anything that this story told us that hasn't been done in other books before. Some will love it, some will hate it, and even though I don't like to be middle of the road on things most of the time I am with this. Will I read it again? No. Was it terrible? No. Will I recommend it? Also no. It was fine.

I'm catching up on reviews so... Thank you to NetGalley and Celestial Eyes Press for access to this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in return for an honest review. I did sneak a look at a few reviews before I started this book and it did not sound promising from them. I am so glad I decided to make my own mind up and give it a go. It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting but it turned out to be a really enjoyable read. Primarily based around the topics of jealousy and friendships with the added Y2K element. It was an interesting read and I recommend giving it a chance. 4 stars from me.

I thank Netgalley and the author for allowing me to read and review an ARC copy of this book.

Blurb:
A housewarming party ends in tragedy. . . Steve Galanos, a native Midwesterner, reflects on his time in and near Silicon Valley during the 1990s, a time when the two-digit year emerged as the Y2K problem, the burgeoning Internet fueled the expansion of the New Economy, the dot-com bubble created unseen prosperity and real estate frenzies. Yet it’s a housewarming party, held in late 1999, that affects him the most.

Review:
This book for me was thankfully short, as I didn't like the main character much. He was constantly criticising others, their relationships, and the way they lived their lives, while also brewing an incredible jalousy for his friend that according to him, was just luckyer than him. With everything that happened in the novel, it didn't seem like his friend was the greatest eather, but that doesn't justify how the main character behaved towards him.
Also the whole plot point with Mary and Sweed 11 felt a little questionable, as it is not unheard of for people to be roommates for a long time just to hate their guts behind their backs, but that begs the question: why did they keep seeing each other then?
Despite that, I liked Mary and disliked Sweede 11 because she seemed unnecessarily childish, but that might have also only been an inaccuracy from the narrator's perspective, considering that after all most we learn turns out not to be true.
Regardless, the only thing I liked was how great it felt to dislike the main character and the way everything unfolded, offering a perfect example of an unlikable main character that blames everything wrong in his life on others, because it is much easier than taking accountability for his own failures and actions.

SPOIERS from here:
This is because when he talks about his competition with John, it is clear that it is unhealthy and probably onehanded, as the other character is not very concious about it. When comparing the love history of both characters, Steven is only interested in girls if they are in some way interested in John, just to get back at him, and this is clear even with his wife and the way he falls for her even though he knows she is off limits.

Overall I will give the book 3 stars because it rattled my emotions and made me think, qualifying it as a good enough quick read that anyone might want to read if they like complex relationships and unlikable main characters.

For some reason, net galley didn’t allowed me to review this tittle and right now is that I’m being able to access it :(

The narrator, Steve Galanos recounts his memories of a housewarming party that occurred in 1999, at the height of the Y2K problem and the dot com bubble. He developed a friendship with co-worker John, John’s wife Mary, and her friend Lauren. However he was intensely jealous of John and there was tension in their relationship. The novel drags until the night of the housewarming finally happens and tragedy ensues. All of the characters were unlikeable, and the mens’ actions were extremely sexist. Some curiosity about the mysterious event at the party kept me reading, but I didn’t enjoy the book.

Set in the late 1990s, Many Are Invited starts as a sort of buddy story. The two male leads, Steve and John, both in their mid thirties, work for the phone company, trying to resolve the Y2K problem of what will happen to the world’s computer systems when 12/31/1999 shifts to 01/01/2000. They become fairly close until John leaves the company and joins a dot-com. He becomes wealthy, meets his future wife, Mary, and lives a prosperous life. Steve stays in the same old phone company job, dates around without meeting a significant other, and develops such an envy of John’s life that Steve ultimately falls in love with Mary but doesn’t act upon it.

This book is supposedly a retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and there are a number of mentions of Gatsby and other characters, and there is even a Many Are Invited character named somewhat after Fitzgerald because of his very vague distant relationship to F. Scott. That said, the characters are not particularly likable. Steve is envious of John and always feels out-classed. The women are archetypal “good” or “bad” women without much substance. The more lush the body, the worse the personality.

The title, Many Are Invited, refers to an invitation to an open house party given by John and Mary as they settle into their first house. The story is fairly slow until the tragedy set up in the first few pages finally strikes at the open house. The denouement seems overly long in proportion to the rest of the novel, and the ending feels rather abrupt.

Many Are Invited has been on my TBR list for a while and I'm not sure what drew me to it in the first place. Perhaps I thought it would be like The Beauty of the Fall by Rich Marcello which was also involved technology. Or maybe it was to experience through another person a piece of history that I lived through.

I was working as a zoo keeper and worked both New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. I remember prepping extra water buckets in case there wasn't any electricity when the calendar rolled over. It was all a waster of course and January 1, 2020 was like any other start of the new year.

We know from the summary that a tragedy occurs at the party but we don't know any details so I thought perhaps this is a mystery novel. But it really isn't. The actual plot actually matters very little as the book is all about the characters. If you enjoy character-driven stories or "people watching", then this is your kind of book.

For me, the 1990s don't feel that long ago but according to the calendar, it's been more than a minute. Reading this novel put the time more in perspective. A few readers have mentioned the sexism in the novel. I felt like the author captured the culture on the 1990s pretty well. The way the male characters talk about women is pretty spot on.

I'm not sure I actually liked any of the characters. The story is told from Steve Galons's POV so some of it might have been seeing the characters through his eyes. But the conversations he had with Mary and Lauren individually had me disliking both of the main female characters.

A lot of reviews mention that this is a retelling of The Great Gatsby. I'm not sure if this was part fo the marketing materials when the book first came out - if so, it might be the reason I picked up the book. While reading the book, I didn't see the parallel but now that it's been mentioned I can see some similarities.

The story begins and ends at the housewarming party, but in the middle, the reader is taken back to the mid-1990s when IT people first became aware of what would become known as the Y2K bug. It was kind of interesting to get the background on an issue that dominated the last year of the 1990s.

The book is a short, quick read. So if you are still trying to meet your reading goal for the year, think about picking up this book.

My review will be published at Girl Who Reads on Friday - https://www.girl-who-reads.com/2023/12/many-are-invited-by-dennis-cuesta-review.html

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! No spoilers. Beyond amazing I enjoyed this book so very much. The characters and storyline were fantastic. The ending I did not see coming Could not put down nor did I want to. Truly Amazing and appreciated the whole story. This is going to be a must read for many many readers. Maybe even a book club pick.

In other reviews I read after finishing this novel, I saw that other readers noted it was a retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Seen through that lens, I think I appreciate the novel a bit more than I did as I was reading it. However, I struggled to connect to it and could not figure out where the story was going. Was it a story about Y2K? A corporate rivalry story? A crime story? Something else? There were hints at all of these and the author dangled tantalizing clues along the way, but I didn't really feel like it gelled for me.

The narrator, Steve, seemed to be meandering through life, insecure and off-kilter. I wondered more than once how reliable of a narrator he was and what his motivations were for many of his actions and behavior. There was a bit of barrier between me and the other characters, who he didn't seem to particularly like even though he stayed in their orbits. This made it hard for me to like or care about them myself. I can't say I enjoyed spending time with them very much. Once the big reveal of what happened at the fateful party was made, the ending seemed rushed compared to the earlier pacing of the story. I also felt like the book ended somewhat abruptly even though the tale had clearly come to an end.

Many thanks to the Celestial Eyes Press and the author for providing a NetGalley copy of this title. I hope it finds the right reader, but sadly that was not me.

I do not think that I can recommend this one. I did not like the characters and was totally annoyed with all the political talk. For whatever reason this one rubbed me the wrong way.

Plot was interesting, but there we some jumps that didn’t make sense. I did not connect with the characters at all.

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to the publisher for the #gifted copy.

I hd been told that this was a retelling of the Great Gatsby, but set in the early 90s. I am not sure where this book exactly went wrong, but I was disappointed from the beginning. I was not a fan of how women were treated in this book and stopped reading after that.

Thank you to Celestial Eyes Press and Netgalley for a copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review.

I will start by saying I made it 80% through the book and I simply could not read any more. I just couldn't do it.

I simply don't understand what the point of this book was at all. Or what it's even about, besides really uninteresting babble between some coworkers awaiting the Y2K change on their computers.

I read somewhere that this was supposed to be like "Great Gatsby" but I didn't see that at all. The description of the book and the beginning almost make it seem like this will be some type of murder mystery. It is not:

Unfortunately, there's really nothing positive I can say about this book.

A 3.5 round up to a 4. A quick read, easily read in an afternoon. Irony upon irony. Mostly written as the memory of an event in the life of 'Steve'. A lot of characters to keep up with and a lot if chatter at a fateful party but push on through. I didn't like this as much as one of his other books but it's an ok read. I was provided an advanced reader copy and was under no obligation to write a review. The opinions expressed are my own. Thanks to the author publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read the book.

Good book and well written. Not too long and not too short. I liked the Scott Fitzgerald references. We’ve forgotten about the Y2K concerns so this book reminded me of a lot of those. Thank you to net galley and the publisher for an ARC of this book

I didn't ask for this book and has no plans intentions or reading it. The re idea currently sound like it's not a book I would want to finish.