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.
Review of 'The Chosen and the Beautiful' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
Oh boy, what a wonderful, temptuous, sexys world. Nghi Vo manages to take the stuffy boring posh of Gatsby and turn it into a seductive tale told through the lens of a reimagined Jordan Baker.
A young Vietnamese woman, she delicately weaves her way though the ultra wealth white upper class, navigating racism and identity along the way. But she also explores the queerness and magic that is woven into this retelling. Here gay clubs are safely disguised under magical barriers, people sell their souls to demons for wealth and power, Gatsby's parties are entertained by carnivals of living paper and enchanted to keep the night young and happy.
The story stays true to the classic narrative but it's where it charts it own course that it truly shines. It certainly left me wanting more from these mystical roaring 20s.
Review of 'The Chosen and the Beautiful' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
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.
Review of 'The Chosen and the Beautiful' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
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.
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.
Review of 'Chosen and the Beautiful' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
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 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 to make explicit a great many things which were just heavily implied before. If you've never read The Great Gatsby, don't worry about it, you don't need that book in order to understand this one.
I love the use of magic, everything from the paper creations to treating demoniac as one more opportunity for vice in the midst of Prohibition. The characters are vibrant, and the way Jordan's position as simultaneous insider (affluent, friends with Daisy) and outsider (queer, Asian, adopted) sets her up to poke at the strangeness of some moments and ride with the feeling of others. Part of what this makes explicit is just how much sex was happening in and around Gatsby's parties. It starts out heavily implied, almost coy as Jordan refers to sleeping at different women's houses but not saying exactly what she did there, but gradually it becomes more and more clear. I love this portrayal of a young bi (or possibly pan) woman who knows what she wants and feels free to explore. She gets a chance to meet other Asian people and start to explore a side of herself which she lost easy access to as an adoptee. This gives her room for a storyline separate from the sensual but volatile combination of herself, Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy, and it works really well. It plays with expectation, illusion, disappointment, and surprise in a way that supports the main story but explores a part of her that their society only mentions to say they (most often Tom) didn't mean for that microaggression to catch her.
This is an excellent retelling which doesn't need the original in order to be understood. It uses the original's themes of excess, alienation, the desperate need to be loved, and the loneliness of a crowd, then combines them with marginalizations of queerness and race to give them a poignancy and context that leaps off the page.
Review of 'The Chosen and the Beautiful' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
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.
