LOCAL HEAVENS
RATED 4 STARS

Arc provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, thank you!

This is K.M Fajardo’s first published book, so naturally it was also my first book by her - and it is quite wonderful. Local Heavens is a cyberpunk retelling of Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby, set in the year 2075 where the world is connected through cybernets and ruled by mega companies, and in which body modifications have become the norm. The setting is what truly sets it apart from The Great Gatsby, and it’s what makes it distinctly unique compared to both the original book and other retellings.

I’ll therefore start by saying that the setting, and the way Fajardo has reworked these characters to fit the setting, is my favorite part of the book. Local Heavens is set over 150 years later than the original novel yet the plot and characters in many ways stays the same, which speaks both to the longevity and importance of the original novel and to Fajardo's talent as a writer. Fajardo expands on the characters in a wonderful and meaningful way, making them even more relevant to the world we are living in today (and the world we might live in in the future). The reimagining of Jordan (!) and Daisy, and the roles they play in the story, I especially found compelling. Another aspect that I liked was that the main character Nick was Filipino-American, which both opened up pathways to discuss timely issues such as globalism and racism, and also added layers to his relationship with the world and the characters around him. That being said, he is not Filippino-American just to explore themes or bring up issues. He’s Filipino-American, as one might be just American, and that is it.

The relationships in this book are all well-written, and especially between those in the love square. I think there is a big risk when doing a love square, or a triangle or whatever shape it is, that it becomes messy and underdeveloped. This was not the case in Local Heavens. All relationships are well developed and feel equally important, both to the characters themself but also to the plot of the book. The relationships that Nick has very much affects his character throughout the book, and vice versa. None of them feels redundant or meaningless. One exception to this is the character of Owl Eyes, who felt a bit shoe-horned in. She appears in the beginning of the book and then disappears not to be seen in person until the very end. I did not find myself caring for her or her crew, which is sad because she is a very big part of the book's conclusion and theme.

This book explores themes of racism, globalism, capitalism, sexism, class and, to an extent, parasocial relationships. It also touches upon feelings of passiveness, guilt and responsibility and what one person can do in a horrible world. I found all of these themes to be well executed, and full of nuance. It is certainly a book that makes you both think and feel, which to me is the best kind of book.

Finally, Fajardo’s prose is lovely and worked very well, with one or two exceptions in which the metaphors were not doing it for me. Overall though, I found the book to be beautifully written and as I was reading I found myself just highlighting entire passages because the prose was that good. One thing I will mention is that I was at one point very confused because the year the book takes place is at first not stated within the text itself - it is on the back of the book, though, which means it is easy to find, but maybe it should have been explicitly stated in the text as well as to avoid confusion. One last thing that I want to say is that at times it felt as if the book was split into Jordan parts and Gatsby parts, and that Nick could only communicate with one of them at a time. The story had to wait until the Gatsby part was over for Nick to have a conversation with Jordan or vice versa, and it felt weird because they logically should have talked much earlier than that.

Overall, I found this book to be very very enjoyable and I read through it quickly. I rated it four stars, and it is a book that I definitely recommend you read! I certainly am looking forward to reading more from this author in the future. And remember kids - committing crimes is okay if it’s against chairmen of evil corporations (who said that?!?)

I'd read the Great Gatsby a few years back and absolutely loved the book, so when I saw K. M. Fajardo promoting it on Instagram, I knew I had to read it. Which means: I enjoyed the OG version quite a bit, but do not remember all of the details.

For a retelling, I believe that K. M. Fajardo stayed fairly close to the original. The prose was smooth and enjoyable, the characters were fleshed out for the most part, and the relationships between them I particularly enjoyed. The snippets of Filipino culture she included, I appreciated very much. I also recall the author mentioning the bi rep was "swings both ways and misses" and the importance of this I definitely had a good chuckle about when I finished the book. I absolutely enjoyed the drama in the latter half of the book. There were moments where I actually gasped out loud, then immediately had to cover my mouth because I was in public. For a debut, this novel is solid.

That being said, though, I do have a few gripes with this book. More specifically, I have gripes with the setting and two characters.
The setting wasn't really vivid for me. The terminology wasn't too confusing and I believe everything was explained decently (like VINEs, pyres), but the setting felt more like the second or third wash of colour in a watercolour painting for most of the time. This meant that the story was relying primarily on the characters to carry it forward, which brings me to my second gripe: Owl Eyes and Nick.

If Owl Eyes was removed from the plot, I'm sure something else can be put in her place and achieve the same effect of adding tension. And Nick, sometimes his actions were out of character for what I expected of him. Re: Owl Eyes. He felt a bit like a new seedling entirely at the mercy of the wealthy winds swaying him, so not much urgency in his actions. What even were his wants? I had no idea.

I did enjoy this book and how Fajardo stayed faithful to the Great Gatsby while adding her own flare in the drama between the four points of the love square. I'd love to see how she develops as an author, and how her prose strengthens with her voice in the future. For a debut novel and for a debut novelist, she shows promise. But for a book, I'm afraid it was only a 'meh' read for me.

Thank you for the eARC.

Calling all Great Gatsby and cyberpunk fans! Or if you are like me and haven’t read The Great Gatsby in a while, no need to fear- you can hop right into this. Following Nick Carraway on his journey into Jay’s world was interesting, focusing on wealth inequality and the impact of capitalism, amidst an unrequited love story.

I enjoyed this setting and the futuristic descriptions, especially the looming presence of all the ad drones. I I found the story was crafted very well. I think some of the impact of things may have been lessened on me as I haven’t read the original in a while, but very fun nonetheless.

Thank you to Netgalley and Bindery Books for the ARC!

Retellings are hard, right? If you change too much, people get pissed. If you don't change enough, people get pissed. I'm not enough of a Gatsby fan to get mad about Local Heavens either way. I enjoyed it for the class criticism and general eat-the-rich-type sentiments.

...I am probably going to re-read TGG soon, though.

Did not finish 52%

I was really intrigued by the idea of a dystopian gatsby retelling but I'm just not clicking for me. The world building is quite detailed but for some reason it's just not capturing my attention and it's hard to follow all of the tech stuff. I was struggling trying to map everything on to gatsby to be able to follow the character motivations and just realized I don't care to keep trying since the plot isn't interesting me.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

So… confession: I’ve never read *The Great Gatsby*. I tried the first chapter once, but bounced off. That said, I picked up *Local Heavens* because the premise sounded cool — cyberpunk NYC, class divide, secret hacking, future tech billionaires. It even reminded me a little of *The Thousandth Floor* (yes, that YA guilty pleasure), which made me excited at first.

But honestly? I struggled. The writing isn’t bad at all — I could tell it was well done, carefully crafted even — but I never felt immersed or hooked. The “rich and glamorous” world felt too distant from me, and the cyberpunk details weren’t fleshed out enough to pull me into the story. So I ended up in this weird middle space where nothing grounded me, not the setting, not the characters.

DNF at p. 134. For me, it just wasn’t engaging enough to keep going. Maybe someday I’ll return and have a different opinion.

Oh my god. The way this book DEVOURED. I have read the great gatsby so I was familiar with the broad strokes of the story going in. But Fajardo did such a masterful job writing this book that I hoped with every inch of my heart that the ending would be different. The world was so well fleshed out. The nuance of privilege and the rebellion of body bods. The concept of diving and such deeply flawed and human characters. This book reminded me why I adore cyberpunk.

This book accomplishes the rare feat of expanding upon its source material and enhancing the experience of reading it. Not only did this touch on the same themes in such a smart way as The Great Gatsby, and was rife with gorgeous prose and interesting characters, it also added so many new threads to explore. Racism, queerness, and transhumanism all blend with the other aspects to lay out a bleak picture of the death of the American Dream, and its amalgamation into a synthetic fantasy. The heady, electrically charged environment elevates the setting of East/West Egg past the glamour of the roaring 20s and into a tecno-capitalist near future. The characters had tension through the roof, and Nick and Gatsby had me so invested in their relationship that I was genuinely angry when things went a certain way, and feeling like cheering when they went another.
I could say so much more; I could write an essay on this book and how much I enjoyed it, but I will just sit with all of the emotions it brought up for the next while, and reread this as soon as it’s published.

Any fan of Gatsby will love this ambitious retelling. The Nick we waited 100 years for. I adored this book. The writing is intelligent and creative. Fitzgerald would be proud of this old sport.

This was absolutely brilliant—sharp, stylish, and so thought-provoking. The way it reimagines Gatsby in a cyberpunk dystopia feels both wildly inventive and eerily relevant, with its commentary on wealth, power, and technology. Nick’s perspective pulled me right into this world of neon-lit glamour and shadowy secrets, and the moral dilemmas at the heart of the story gave it so much depth. Gorgeous, haunting, and unforgettable.

An enthralling, enchanting read. I adored this book. The writing was beautiful, timeless and eloquent, laden with imagery that not only illustrates the plot and setting but lends it a new, dazzling light. The queer representation, and the emotional frustrations in the relationships between the main characters, were authentic and human and devastatingly powerful. I cannot wait to read more from this author.

This book is just.... wow! I've been following Kris for a while now, so needless today I was already going in expecting to love the book, but my mind was blown away with just about everything. From the smallest words to the great character arcs, she executed this project flawlessly and definitely created something beautiful. I'm going to have to re-read this a couple more times to process it!
Thank you to netgalley for providing me with an e-ARC.

The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite classics. It’s a story I find to be relevant to us even now, 100 or so years later. So the fact that K.M. Fajardo has managed to take that story and make it even more relevant to the times is impressive and comforting and frightening all at once. Local Heavens. What a piece on what’s become of our society as of today. How pertinent, how moving, how fucking tragic.
Fajardo manages to keep the magic of what makes Gatsby so great. These characters feel like they belong in this story amidst a beautifully built fantasy system and prose that is to die for. She gives us what most of us want from the original novel. True understanding, slow and earned. It’s sexy, it’s erotic, it’s another version of Nick and Gatsby and Daisy and Jordan rocketing through a new age trying their best to find their footing. Trying to hold on to each other as the world around them shakes and bucks. We know how this story goes. We know how it ends, and yet Fajardo manages to coax us into the world again with no false promises. No promises of life or death, love or hatred, just beautiful literature. A chance to see ourselves and our world and a way through it all.
For all the devastation, Fajardo manages to be so realistic yet so hopeful on such a poignant and heart-wrenching topic, it should inspire hope in her readers. The world around us is changing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change it for the better. We can make it through these dark times if we stick together, if we keep our sense of community alive, ready to be leaned on when necessary, ready to lend a hand. We must fight for what we’ve always believed in. For a future that includes all of us, one that doesn’t threaten to leave us behind.
Thank you to Netgalley for access to this title. And please, check out Local Heavens on October 14, 2025.

Devoured in about 20 days! As a longtime follower of Fajardo on YouTube, I was thrilled to see not just a talented author but a fellow Filipino breaking into publishing. When the ARC was released, I ran to make a NetGalley account just to request it, and I can't speak to how it blew me out of the water.

I've never read The Great Gatsby, so I went in half-blind, but this was a razor-sharp and evocative story in its own right. The prose is stunning and deep. The world is beautiful and disgusting in equal parts, a technologically advanced version of our own with familiar flaws amplified to terrifying extremes. The commentary on capitalism, inequality, and disparity is incredibly keen and powerful.

The way entertainment evolved into a horrifying drug is a sharp reflection of the way we interact with social media, presented as casual and normal to the characters, but readers understand how horrifying it truly is.

Nick’s portrayal as a Filipino immigrant is a quiet, real experience of being raised in a country you will never belong to, and how it hammers home the feeling of being foreign everywhere. Like it's always in the back of his mind, which felt honest and deeply relatable.

At its core, the book is an incredibly keen commentary on the disparity between the rich and poor, how the rich and fortunate all choose to deal with it or ignore it. Every single character was multidimensional, vivid and beautifully ugly.

The romance is captivating and sweet yet never overshadows the larger themes. Nick had some beautiful character growth; from passively drifting to finding his own agency.

And on a personal note, seeing Tagalog in a book from a major Western publisher felt amazing.

Overall, 5 stars. Not a flaw in sight. Fajardo is one to watch!

I liked the Filipino rep and the futuristic twist, but Local Heavens isn’t bringing anything super new to the table—and to be fair, it doesn’t really need to. You don’t pick up a Gatsby retelling expecting a groundbreaking plot, just a fresh lens, and this one does that okay. Nothing crazy or mind-blowing, but if you want a sleek remix of a classic with some solid commentary, it’s a decent read.

DNF. I was really excited to read this since I'm a fan of the author's YouTube channel and that cover is absolutely gorgeous, not so much with <i>The Great Gatsby</i>. A lot of what I read was definitely the Fitzferald book which felt odd (I know it's a retelling but it felt too much of the original). The cyberpunk elements needed more explanation as opposed to relying on context clues. I didn't really get a sense of place which was weird with the cyberpunk elements thrown in. Overall, this probably needed one more round of edits to make sure the futuristic elements are explained since that pulled me out of the story.

Thank you to the publisher and author for this ARC.
Local Heavens was a big surprise for me. I was never really in love with the original Gatsby. Perhaps if I had re-read it as an adult I might have taken more from it than I did. But as it is, I only remembered the main points of it from when I read it back in highschool and I was worried that would mean I wouldn’t be able to enjoy this retelling as much.
Local Heavens might be a retelling of a classic, but it absolutely stands on its own as an excellent novel. Remaking Gaysby’s story into a dystopian near-future era of technological revolution was an excellent decisionto tease out and expamd the themes in the book. The role technology, money, and greed play in this story leave the reader with a feeling both of otherworldly curiosity that is also terrifyingly current.
The world building and the way technology has merged with this society, and with the body itself is really intricate. It makes sense but it is all the more unsettling for it.
It can get a bit confusing at times, to parse out exactly how the world has changed, but it just keeps you that much more attached and attentive. I like that the author trusts the reader to put together the world they have built without the need for excessive info dumping.

All in all, I am very excited for this book to be available to the public. It is a thrilling, unsettling, nostalgic and harrowing rendition of a classic that never quite hit for me, and that as its own piece, gives Nick’s fresh new life.

First, I would like to thank Bindery Books | Inky Phoenix Press for the eARC. This book has been a must-read since I saw K.M. share about it on her Twitter account and it's truly better than I could have ever imagined. Disclaimer, I am not the biggest fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a person, but as an author, there is no denying the impact that The Great Gatsby had on the literary world.  So, when I learned about a cyberpunk, Filipino, queer re-telling, I perked up!

Off the bat, I was invested, as Nick is sent to investigate the dealings of Jay Gatsby, there is something about knowing one character's intention while the other slowly unravels the ball of thread connecting the two. The shroud of mystery between their dynamic imitation an intriguing relationship in which you’re able to get a true sense of how they operate in a world of demands and expectations. Being set in a futuristic world, where body modification technology is a lucrative business, there is risk within every bit of action the characters do or don’t do. These moments hold my attention as I was able to pause and ponder how situations could potentially unravel as stakes grow or dissipate - may that be through the business of money or of the heart.

The pacing of this book was incredibly balanced. Between the missions being conducted to the social pressures and expectations rising, there was a natural ebb and flow that kept my attention and drove me to continue to see how conflicts would be resolved and how character interactions would shift.

I found LOCAL HEAVENS to be a brilliant take on a well-known piece of literature. While there are odes to Fitzgerald’s original work, F.M Fajardo created an entirely new perspective that arguably has a similar level of influence as it’s predecessor. For those who enjoy classic literature or are curious about how a required reading could be born again, LOCAL HEAVENS is a must-read for your Fall TBR.

The world building was excellent, the secondary characters enchanting, and the outlook almost dire and bleak. The voice and tone felt like they were trying to emulate the original, rather than the author's own, but it's hard to tell as I've not read anything else by them!

I always forget how much I like speculative fiction, and I honestly think if this had been it's own book instead of a retelling of the Great Gatsby it would have been better. That's not to say the book was bad, not at all. It was a great read, but it trod the beats of the Great Gatsby and it made things almost... expected.

The book kept you with it, but something about the ending just didn't quite settle with the tone and actions of the rest of the book.

Local Heavens is a great gatsby retelling that has my heart. Set in 2075 New York City, Filipino-American Nick Carraway is sent to investigate mysterious billionaire Jay Gatsby, and the secrets that surround him.

Let me start off by saying that I have never read the original work of The Great Gatsby, and I am only familiar with it due to movies and pop culture. I am so enthralled by the story that is told that I want to read the original work, and that is only because of how Local Heavens delves into the depths of the relationship each character has with each other.

The cyberpunk setting is nothing to scoff at. Nick Carraway is a netdiver and most of the cyberpunk setting is fleshed out by him and the grim reality that surrounds him, one where millionaires are trying to cheat death and leaving any lower class with no space to live. My favorite scenes are those that dig into the heart of the technological concepts created.

While I can’t compare the two works, I enjoyed the cyberpunk story of moral decrepitude at its finest.