Published in: January-February 2022 issue.
THE CHOSEN AND THE BEAUTIFUL
by Nghi Vo
Tordotcom. 336 pages, $26.
IT WAS INEVITABLE that when the copyright for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic The Great Gatsby expired, the floodgates for adaption and reinvention would open. And what better author to broach that possibility than Nghi Vo, author of the highly acclaimed novel The Chosen and The Beautiful, which came out last May?
This time the story is told from the point of view of Fitzgerald’s original supporting character, Jordan Baker, who is reinvented as a queer Vietnamese-American protagonist taking on the American Dream and all its glittering quirks and failures.
Michele Kirichanskaya, a freelance journalist from Brooklyn, creates content for platforms like The Mary Sue, GeeksOUT, and others.