3.0
The Chosen and the Beautiful
ByPublisher Description
An Instant National Bestseller!
An Indie Next Pick!
A Best of Summer Pick for TIME Magazine | CNN | NBC News | CBS News | Book Riot | The Daily Beast | Lambda Literary | The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | Goodreads | Bustle | Veranda Magazine | The Week | Bookish | St. Louis Post-Dispatch | Den of Geek | LGBTQ Reads | Pittsburgh City Paper | Bookstr | Tatler HK
A Best Fantasy Novel from the Last 10 Years for Book Riot
A Best of the Year Pick for NPR
“A vibrant and queer reinvention of F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age classic. . . . I was captivated from the first sentence.”—NPR
"Nghi Vo is one of the most original writers we have today."—Taylor Jenkins Reid on Siren Queen
“A sumptuous, decadent read.”—The New York Times
“Vo has crafted a retelling that, in many ways, surpasses the original.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Immigrant. Socialite. Magician.
Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.
But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.
Nghi Vo’s debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Chosen and the Beautiful Reviews
3.0
“This is a gorgeous retelling of The Great Gatsby told from Jordan Baker’s perspective.
This was an interesting take on the often overlooked in cinematic adaptions character.
The book jacket holds the secrets. There’s magic in this world, but I was viewing it as a metaphor for her “otherness,” a magical realism situation so the ending just gutted me cause I was not reading what was in front of me and I think that enhanced my reading of the book.
It was interesting seeing taken straight from the original scenes from Jordan’s viewpoint. She could see behind the mask what others could not. Making her a Vietnamese adoptee gave an extra enchantment in the social/race/class observations of the original novel. The novel glides seamlessly from that to new scenes filling in the backstory and life of Jordan Baker.
This book also gave me the queer lense that I felt was bubbling underneath the surface of the original and brought it to the forefront.
This was gorgeous and will definitely do a reread.
‘I do not like to make a habit of admitting my mistakes.’
‘Of course, the young lieutenant from Camp Taylor still had his soul, and by 1922, Jay Gatsby of West Egg had no such thing.’
‘She was right in the end, and we none of us were wanted, but you never would have guessed it then.’
I was a little crazy after secrets that year. I liked collecting them, and though I seldom told, I did gloat.’
“I’ll bring you anything you want,” he said, and I tilted my head at him.
“You ought not say such things to me,” I said gravely. “I might ask you for the moon, and what would you do then?”
‘Seeing him then, you knew he would remake the world for the object of his desire, but what a world it would be, and it wasn’t as if you could stop him. A knew Gatsby right then for what he was: a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true.’
‘I couldn’t tell whether Gatsby was telling the truth, but Nick was, and I changed the few things I knew about him around a bit in my head.’
‘I never gave him a real answer because the real answer wasn’t one that men got.’
‘It was becoming obvious to me and to them that I couldn’t follow them into marriage and luncheon and good works. They wouldn’t introduce me formally to their brothers and their cousins, and while I had been a delightful pet and mascot, I simply had no place beyond their childhood days.’
‘Careful, we had to be so very careful all the time, and the reward was this, lying in the dark, as if we were the same girls we had been the week before.’
“Is that a story you often tell to people you want to get on your side?” I asked.
“It is the story I am telling,” he said with a different smile, and that smile tugged at me to suggest that he wouldn’t tell just anyone.’
“I don’t like to involve myself with other people’s love affairs,” I lied.
“It’s not like that,” he said hastily, but the fully that flashed over his face told me otherwise. “Look. I want to be fair to you. What do you like, what do-“
“No!” I said, glaring at him. “We are not doing that, do you hear me? No bargains, please, not for this. I’m just fine as I am, thank you.”
‘However, it was a crowded summer, and it was not until later, when I could thread the steps to disaster together like glass beads on a string, that those times stood out at all.’
‘It was as if kissing Thomas had laid me open to a world where anyone might be kissed, and standing next to Helen, as she recited the names of those foreign cities, I became aware that she had a mouth as well’
‘You weren’t meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn’t peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, had nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted.’
‘In that one still moment, it was as if Daisy had, all unknowing, taken Jay Gatsby‘s heart for her own, and he would spend the rest of his life, trying to get it back.’
‘He stands on that pier, I thought suddenly. He stands there, and he looks across the water, and he looks across the years to when she was his, and when she will be his.’
‘He rose unsteadily to his feet, and I saw with satisfaction how I had ruined him.’
“No, come on,” I said, dragging him down towards the water. “When you can’t fix a thing, the best course of action can be to ruin it all so that no one can see and truly happened.”
‘What does it look like when a thousand-year hunter gets a taste of what it craved?’
‘If had thought about it at all, I would’ve guessed that Gatsby’s house would have a haunted air to it during the day, when the only people who walked it’s gorgeous halls were servants, when the only people enjoying themselves might be the ghosts.’
‘I wondered if he would bring back a touch of Gatsby with him, whether it was the scent of Gatsby’s cologne or the taste of Gatsby’s mouth on his own.’
‘Changelings were growing less common as time went on, the fairy magic draining out of the east and flowing west, but there were a few cases every few years of it happening , usually in the good families as well.’
‘I held my breath because something was going to die in that room. I might have wanted to leave before, but now I couldn’t take my eyes away.’
‘His house bristled the gap, and it was safe. It was safe for all of us, for me to kiss who I liked, for Nick to kiss Gatsby, for Gatsby to love Daisy, and for Hell to play its games.’
‘Of course I am, I thought, but I wasn’t Jay Gatsby. Love wasn’t enough for me, and Daisy had proved it would never be enough for her.’
“Did you really love him so much?” I asked.
He hesitated, and I saw terrible moment when he realized he had nothing left to give me but the truth.”
Change and growDiverse representationMemorableMinor characters stand outMorally ambiguousMultilayeredStrong relationshipsStrong villainUnforgettable protagonistClever plottingSatisfying conclusionSteady pacingTwistyUnpredictableWell-structuredAtmosphericEvocative imageryImmersive world-buildingOpulentSetting fits the storySurrealVivid descriptionsBeautifully-writtenDescriptiveFunnyWittyBigotryDeathGriefViolence
“It was a great read. I thought that it would represent queerness in 1920s and dive deeper into feeling like the odd one out when it came to Jordan’s race. I was so amazingly surprised to see that it represented so much more including the female experience, moral ambiguity, the symbolism of otherness through magic, and redefining a story in an insightful and relatable way.”
Change and growMinor characters stand outMultilayeredOriginalUnforgettable protagonistClever plottingGripping/excitingTwistyBeautifully-writtenFlowery/lushTakes getting used toWhimsical toneBigotryChild lossDeathDomestic violenceExplicit sexual contentGriefHomophobiaMisogynyMurderRacismSubstance abuseViolence
“Pretty language, but it took until page 180 for me to feel like things were actually, finally happening. The last 80 pages added the .25 to what would have been a solid 3 star rating. Would recommend if you really liked the Great Gatsby to begin with.”
About Nghi Vo
Nghi Vo is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The series entries have been finalists for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Crawford Award, the Ignyte Award, and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.
Other books by Nghi Vo
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