At the risk of sounding like my seventh graders: I did not like this book because it was boring. I had a professor once who always said that "boring" was not a legitimate critique of literature because it's too vague and un-intellectual. I disagree. We read for a lot of reasons, but some of the chief ones for fiction are entertainment, escape, and adventure. This book was sorely lacking in these categories. I love the 1920s and find the Fitzgeralds to be very interesting literary and historical figures, but this book was just too slow. I couldn't figure out if I knew too much or not enough about them to enjoy the book the way I felt the author intended. I read this book on the beach on my Jamaican honeymoon and I was trudging though it. I probably would've given up on it had I had other reading options with me.
The chief problem with this book that made it so boring was the plot. It was meandering and hard to define. It follows Zelda and Scott on the last vacation they took together before his death while they were living on opposite sides of the country (she in a sanitarium in South Carolina, he with his girlfriend in Hollywood). They go to Cuba and... almost nothing happens. They meet some suspicious and curious people, but ultimately, they have no real impact on the story or their lives. The climax of the story was almost non-existent, and made even harder to identify by the how meaningless it ultimately became after the fact. The reason the climax was so vague and unimportant was because there was almost no real conflict in the book to drive the plot. The conflict, of course, revolved around Zelda and Scott's disintegrating marriage and almost toxic relationship. But most of that happened in episodes long before the novel starts. By the time we meet them, they are almost old and run-down versions of their former selves, too sad and tired to keep up the effort of fighting. Talk about a downer. And yet, I have read other books about their doomed marriage (For one, Call Me Zelda) that paints it as tragic and poignant, not pathetic and depressing. So most of the conflict is actually internally felt by the protagonists, to no real effect. They are together but the barely interact. They have a near crisis, then go home and back to normal. And then he dies shortly after the novel ends. Bummer, I guess, but this novel made it hard to care about these people. There were not enough things happening in this book to make it interesting, and the things that were happening were not tied together in any meaningful way.
That same professor had another mantra, though, which was that every book, no matter how bad, has something done well in it. I do agree with this. Despite the fact that the narrative plot was boring and slow, the attention to historical detail was amazing. Spargo brought 1930s Cuba and the culture of the time to life vividly. I found myself nostalgic for a time I never experienced. Unfortunately, it was almost TOO detailed, and the characters and plot did not live up to the robust world he created for them to exist in.
One last critique that is rather personal: As a trained historian I do not like it when historical fiction authors do not include a note on the accuracy of their story and the places they have taken liberties. I don't mind it at all when authors bend the historical record to fit a fictional narrative, but I want them to tell me when they do it. I don't know if other people care about this as much as I do.