Nghi Vo’s stunning and subversive retelling of The Great Gatsby subtly infuses the world with magic. Jordan Baker is a queer, adopted Vietnamese American raised in America’s wealthiest social circles. She can make cut paper come to life — though it's a skill she has little opportunity to hone as it comes from her Vietnamese ancestry, and she knows no other person of her heritage. She befriends Daisy as a child, and Daisy becomes the epitome of white wealth and privilege. Immersed in Jazz Age culture, Vo expertly draws out the white patriarchal racism and sexism of The Great Gatsby.
Beautiful prose and diversity, but ultimately I was expecting more "new" content in this close retelling of The Great Gatsby
Barely eeked it’s way to four stars towards the end. The magic system is barley present at all but there’s some good payoff in the final pages that I suppose make it worthwhile. The rewriting of Gatsby with attention to foreigness, queerness, and general lack of privilege people who fall in those categories have was a nice change of pace from the original. I also enjoyed the exploration of the power dynamics between the three men, especially Nick’s overall passivity. I’ll probably be mulling over this one for a long time.
Vo does an incredible job of complementing the feeling and tone of Great Gatsby while adding magical flourishes and giving Jordan a unique backstory and voice of her own.
This is a retelling of THE GREAT GATSBY so good that it made me finally get what literally happened at the end of THE GREAT GATSBY, which was a mystery large enough to vaguely bother me since high school, but so far not quite frustrating enough for me to circle back and fill my knowledge gap. THE CHOSEN AND THE BEAUTIFUL reframes Daisy's friend Jordan Baker as a queer Asian adoptee with a talent for magic and an uneasy position at the upper strata of a society which is intrigued by her right until it casts her aside.
Based on my hazy recollection of the original, this is a beat-for-beat retelling. Because Nick (the original point of view character) and Jordan spend significant stretches of time in separate places, this book takes advantage of that time to focus in on Daisy as she's seen by Jordan away from Gatsby, and …
This was extremely good and refreshingly unlike anything I've read in a long time. A must read for any fan of magical realism. With the Singing Hills cycle and this, Nghi Vo has cemented her place as one of the authors I'll read anything from, no questions asked.
