The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo (2021)
Jordan Baker tells it: queer, Vietnamese, adopted, and able to do magic.
The novel’s sharpest observer is a woman it hardly bothers with. Give her the book, and give her world real magic.
You read fantasy, and you always wondered about Jordan.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the summer, the parties, Daisy, Tom, Nick and Gatsby.
Changes: the narrator and the rules: Jordan Baker, a Vietnamese adoptee in 1920s society, in a Jazz Age of infernal pacts, ghosts and paper magic.
Whose story is it?
Jordan’s.
How much time does it ask?
288 pages in Tor’s trade paperback.
Tor Books: Jordan Baker, “queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee,” in a world of “infernal pacts and dazzling illusions.”
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
More ways into West Egg: The Scribner paperback (“The Only Authorized Edition”) · The Penguin Classics edition, introduction by Min Jin Lee · The Norton Critical Edition, ed. David Alworth