Release Date: June 1, 2021
Publisher: Tor.com Publishing
Genre: Historical Fantasy
Description
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, Asian, adopted, and 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.
My Thoughts
I, like many Americans, read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in high school. Although I remember little of the specifics, I know I found it insufferable and deeply uninteresting. Even as a teenager I was already tired of reading about and discussing rich heterosexual white people and their petty, self-centered problems. I’m sure I saw the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, but all I’ve retained of it is the gif of him raising his champagne glass in a toast and that meme of grumpy Leo sitting on a couch. In short, I do not care about The Great Gatsby. I do, however, very much care about a fantasy retelling of it featuring a queer Vietnamese girl. That is extremely my jam…
Read the rest of this review at Tor.com.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.
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